A VISIT to the Google headquarters in Mountain View, near the southern end of California's San Francisco Bay, must prompt a feeling of nostalgia among web industry veterans. The Googleplex, as the sprawling campus is known, is the place where the dotcom bubble never burst.
When I arrive on a sunny summer morning, a group of employees is playing volleyball outside the entrance foyer. I notice food stations - filled with free sweets and fruit - decorating the corridors of the light, low-rise buildings. (So does my taxi driver: he heads for the fridge full of smoothies and pockets a couple before looking for me.) This impression of easy-going freedom is, of course, partly an illusion. No firm can lead its sector by encouraging slacking, let alone one that generated over $4 billion in revenues in the last three months. Yet according to current and former employees, Google manages something remarkable when it comes to workplace culture. The firm that famously grew from a garage operation to multinational business has, in the process, managed to hold on to the creative spirit that imbued its early days. In that sense, the Googleplex bubble never did burst. Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, is proof of that. Google poached him from a plum academic position - division chief at NASA's nearby Ames Research Center - back in 2001. Prior employers included Sun Microsystems, before which he earned a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. His online CV makes it clear that he has not regretted the move away from academia. A note to recruiters reads: "Please don't offer me a job. I already have the best job in the world at the best company in the world." "It's true," says Norvig, when I ask him about the statement. He is wearing one of his trademark loud shirts as he ambles in, slightly late because of the difficulty of finding the interview room in a campus that has expanded rapidly in recent years. "Google has so many opportunities that you don't feel limited here," he says. It is a feeling that has been maintained to an "amazing degree", he adds. "There are 10,000 people here, but in some ways it feels the same as when I joined and there were 200." So how has Google managed to grow so spectacularly yet still retain a freewheeling ethos? Norvig believes that an absence of hierarchy is key. His staff are organised into groups that focus on specific projects, and often don't even know which vice-president heads the division they work in. The emphasis is on teams to innovate from the bottom up, rather than follow what Norvig calls "Soviet-style" diktats from senior staff.Bending the rules Google has proved extraordinarily successful at commercialising search results - its key product - mainly by selling targeted adverts alongside them. But Norvig says that staff are also encouraged to pursue projects simply because they tie in with Google's overarching mission - which it says is "to organise and promote access to the world's information" - even if there is no immediate pay-off. In the week of my visit, for example, the company has just expanded its Google Earth programme to allow users to navigate through images of hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. "Nobody said we should do that to be profitable," says Norvig. "It's just a really cool thing to do." The firm's willingness to pursue new ideas also means that many staff are working on original projects rather than fixing bugs in old ones. The astronomy project is just one of many: Google also launched a new facial-recognition system this summer, and recently purchased the Finnish firm Jaiku, which specialises in social networking for mobile phones - a sort of Facebook for cellphones. Longer-term, says Norvig, his staff are thinking about language translation software as a step towards making every website accessible to all, irrespective of your native tongue. The firm also has a new directory enquiries system that relies completely on speech recognition software. When it comes to maintaining a creative spirit in the office, having projects like these is a crucial advantage, says Norvig. "We've benefited from the fact that we are growing so fast and are continually having to reinvent ourselves." If that sounds too good to be true, bear in mind that Google is sitting on billions of reserves following its flotation in 2004. Shares in the company, originally offered at $85, are now worth over $700 apiece. That creates the kind of warm glow from investors that allows senior executives to experiment - a "success buffer", as Norvig puts it. "If the company started performing badly you'd see some changes," he says. Google's unique workplace culture stems in part from the company's novel hiring strategies. Norvig says that Google sometimes posts job adverts that only appear when someone searches for an obscure topic that the firm thinks is interesting. "Translation lookaside buffer" - a component of computer memory - is one such phrase that alerted the searcher to a possible opening at Google (although would-be applicants now need to think of something more original, as no ads popped up when I tried that search). Google also ran billboard ads containing complex mathematical challenges, the solution to which led to a webpage that invited applications. Inventive job adverts are part of Google's policy of only hiring candidates whose ability is above the mean of current employees. In contrast, Norvig says that many firms during the dotcom boom were content to hire applicants as long as they were better than at least one current employee. He has developed a simple computer model that compares the two processes. His model introduces noise into the hiring system to reflect the fact that interviews are imperfect and so some candidates with lower than expected ability may be hired. The result was a steady decline in average competence for the dotcom boom strategy. The Google approach, by contrast, leads quickly towards a situation in which the typical employee is among the best available. Like the structure of the firm itself, Google's hiring strategy benefits from ignoring traditional business categorisations. Unlike most companies, Google's project managers don't hire people for specific roles. Rather, people are hired because they are right for Google as a whole. The final decision rests with the Executive Management Group, comprising chief executive officer Eric Schmidt and other senior staff. Only after a candidate is approved are they assigned to a project best suited to their abilities. It is a system that junior staff at many other companies may envy, but it does not necessarily make life easier for directors like Norvig. The lack of a middle management means projects that ultimately fail can hang around for longer than they might in other firms. It also places a strain on Norvig's people skills. He notes that textbooks advise managers to have direct supervision for no more than seven staff. Norvig has 50. "And I'm just back from vacation, so I probably have more," he adds. "I don't know who they are yet." With all that buzz under one roof, it is unsurprising that Norvig has little hankering for his old academic life. Although he remains connected with university research through Google's funding schemes, and continues to update the textbook he wrote on artificial intelligence - an academic best-seller that has been translated into eight languages - the issues that made academia easy to leave are still around today, says Norvig. "It's the scale of problems that you can address. Professors are isolated from each other - they're collegial but competitive. The biggest team you have is yourself and whatever graduate students you have. That's a limitation." While the good times last at Google, those limitations do not exist. "No one cares about how things are organised," says Norvig. "They just want to get things done. You start doing something, and if it's good, it will get there." Jim Giles is a freelance writer based in San Francisco To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
