In The Plex

by Steve Levy

  As huge as Charlie’s was, soon Google’s workforce grew too large to fit into it. Working with an outside caterer and a variety of chefs, Google built a cuisine complex that journalists loved to dwell upon. By 2008, it had eighteen cafés in Mountain View, spread over a couple of square miles of the campus, which continued to expand as Google snapped up nearby buildings abandoned by other Valley businesses. You could now drive down Charleston Road, which fronted the original Silicon Graphics campus, and for a half mile almost every building on both sides of the street sported the Google logo. Though Charlie’s in Building 40 was the most spacious café, with the broadest menu, food-snob Googlers regarded it as a tourist attraction; it was the place Googlers took their guests to, and it was often populated by people attending conferences on campus. The other eateries were more like restaurants beloved by a neighborhood clientele. Walking around Google offices, you would occasionally see charts to help a product group keep track of their lunch venues: a foodie version of the celebrated Traveling Salesman Problem.

  At all the cafés, the menu choices reflected a proscriptive view of nutrition. Google chef Josef Desimone once told a magazine, “We’re here to educate employees on why agave-based soda is better for you than Coca-Cola.” Café 150 limited its menus to items grown or produced within 150 miles of campus. A café called 5IVE in another building prepared its dishes with five ingredients or less.

  How much did it cost Google to provide great food to its employees? “It’s less than a rounding error,” says Sergey Brin. Stacy Sullivan, Google’s director of human resources, was a little more specific. When asked whether the rumored number of $17 a day per employee was accurate, she said, “I don’t have the exact amount—it could be $15, it could be $17. It’s some amount that’s not totally outrageous but significant.” (At $17, that’s a total of about $80 million a year for free food.)

  Food was only the most notable of the other Google perks. Without leaving the campus you could see a doctor, do Pilates, get a Swiss massage. (Google’s masseuse, who wrote a book about her experience—she did not go the warts-and-all route—became a millionaire after the IPO.) Over time, Googlers would wind up with a closet full of corporate swag—jackets, caps, raincoats, umbrellas, fleece jerseys, prints, and more T-shirts than a U2 tour. At one point, Google gave employees backpacks full of survival gear in case of an earthquake.

  “It’s sort of like the corporation as housewife,” wrote Googler Kim Malone in an unpublished novel. “Google cooks for you, picks up and delivers your dry cleaning, takes care of your lube jobs, washes your car, gives you massages, organizes your work-outs. In fact, between the massages and the gym, you’ll be naked at work at least three times a week. It organizes amazing parties for you. And if all that is not enough, there is a concierge service; you can just send an email and they’ll run any errand you want for $25 an hour.”

  Seen another way, Google was simply a continuation of the campus life that many Googlers had only recently left. “A lot of Google is organized around the fact that people still think they’re in college when they work here,” says Eric Schmidt. Andy Rubin, who came to Google in 2004 when the company bought his mobile-technology start-up, guessed that since Brin and Page had never been in the workplace before founding Google, “they structured things from what they were familiar with, which was the PhD program at Stanford. You walk between buildings here and see people interacting like they would at a university. When we hire people, we grade the way they answer each question on a 4.0 basis, and if the average scores are below 3.0, we don’t hire them. We have these GPSs, Google Product Strategy meetings, that are run like PhD defenses.”

  The Google campus hosted a constant flow of technical lectures by employees and visiting computer scientists. Google also sponsored an author series that featured several book talks every week, sometimes several appearances in a day. It regularly showed movies on campus, and when geek milestone films debuted, such as new installments of the Star Wars series, Google often bought out a theater and sprang employees early for the showing. Politicians, actors, and musicians made it a point to include a Mountain View campus visit on their schedules. “You get an email at two in the afternoon saying, ‘Hillary will be here at 5, drop by if you want to,’ and you do come to expect it,” says Devin Ivester, a longtime Googler. On a given day, you might hear Condoleezza Rice on foreign policy, Woody Harrelson on hemp farming, a reading from Barbara Kingsolver, or a Regina Spektor miniconcert. An otherwise obscure Googler, an engineer named Chade-Meng Tan—the job description on his card is “Jolly Good Fellow”—made it a point to get his picture taken with famous campus visitors. A montage of some of his greatest poses (with Bill Clinton, Muhammad Ali, Gwyneth Paltrow, Salman Rushdie, the Dalai Lama) was featured on a prominent wall in Building 43. (“I’m Chinese, so I give great Wall,” he would joke.)

  Google even had its own version of the Learning Annex, called Google University. Besides a number of work-related courses (“Managing Within the Law,” “Advanced Interviewing Techniques”), there were classes in creative writing, Greek mythology, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and, for those contemplating a new career funded with Google gains, “Terroir: The Geology & Wines of California.”

  In April 2010, a software engineer named Tim Bray blogged his experiences as a Noogler on a single day at Mountain View. He woke up at a Google Apartment, a temporary arrangement while visiting from his home base in Seattle. He caught a Google Bus to the campus, doing a bit of work using the Google Wi-Fi supplied to the passengers, arriving in time for free breakfast at one of the Google cafés. For lunch, a companion took him to the Jia café across a few parking lots, known for its excellent sushi. (Thursday was Hot Pot day.) Later in the afternoon he wanted to buy a new camera, so he borrowed one of the free electric-powered Toyota Priuses available to employees and drove to a Best Buy to make his purchase. At 6:30 p.m. someone said, “Dinner?” and he accompanied coworkers to yet another Google café, eating al fresco at picnic tables as the sun set over the lap pool, the beach volleyball court, and the full-size replica of a T. rex fossil nicknamed “Stan.”

  Eric Schmidt loves comparisons of the Google lifestyle to the college experience. “The American university system is the greatest innovation engine ever invented,” he says. The only problem, he conceded, was the employees who cook up stratagems to actually live on Google’s campus. “But the fact of the matter is that for some people living here makes sense,” he says. “Their friends are here, it’s what they’re familiar with, and the things they do here are very similar to what they did in college.”

  The personal perks are more than matched by Google’s aggressive efforts to provide ideal conditions for employees to actually do their work. Joe Kraus, an early Internet entrepreneur (he cofounded Excite) who inevitably wound up at Google after it bought his start-up company in 2008, was pleasantly stunned at the relentless attention to removing the impediments to productive work time.

  He saw particular genius in the way Google provisioned its conference rooms. There are hundreds of these rooms at Google, named mostly after far-flung locations around the globe (e.g., Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso), scheduled in sixty-minute slots with Google’s web-based calendar software (many have small wireless displays by the door indicating who has booked the room for that day). Each room contains a large table with a slot in the center. Protruding out of that slot are snakes of cables from computer chargers for both Macintosh and Windows laptops. Thus no meeting will be delayed while someone dashes back to his office to get a charger. There are also cords that plug the computer into a projector that beams the display onto the wall—a standard companywide system so no one has to fumble while figuring out which protocol this room happens to demand. Likewise, for VC—which for almost all Googlers means “video conferencing,” and not the moneybags types who fund companies—there’s a single standard, and any Google employee could get a remote video connection going in her sleep. There is also a constantly reple
nished supply of pens and dry markers. Essentially, Google has eliminated a potential hundreds of thousands of downtime hours that employees would otherwise spend on housekeeping errands.

  Even more time is saved by Google’s ubiquitous “tech stops” spread about the buildings: these are, in essence, tiny computer shops, indicated by neon markers. When a piece of equipment fails or there is a sudden need for a new mouse or phone charger, all a Googler needs to do is walk no more than a few hundred feet to one of those locations, and almost instantly he or she will be made whole.

  That attitude extends to some of the corporate protocols that at other companies have employees gnashing their teeth at unfriendly, complicated systems that divert their efforts to filling out forms instead of actually working. For instance, when Googlers complained that the expenses process was a time-wasting drudgery, Google set up a corporate “G-Card” that automated the work. (In a Star Trek–themed video to explain the system, a Mr. Spock–like character said, “The G-Card is a Visa card accepted galaxywide. The Federation pays the bill for you. The charges teleport directly into the new expense reporting tool.”)

  And if at any time a Googler had the urge to work standing up, podium style, or to use a physio ball as a desk chair, all that is required is to “file a ticket” on a site on the corporate intranet. Very quickly—often that day—someone appears to make the adjustments to the office to optimize the desk. “After trials and tribulations with many ergonomically correct chairs and exercise balls, I’ve found that just standing up while working is the best for me,” says Matt Waddell, who filed a “magic ticket” and had his podium less than twenty-four hours later.

  The business perks were of a piece with the fuzzier amenities such as free food, T-shirts, and lectures by Jane Fonda. It was a holistic effort to make sure that when a Googler stressed out, the cause would more often be fear that Larry would kill their project than a broken phone or the inability to get a video connection with a collaborating engineer in Moscow. Such largesse was costly. Companies that treated employees more conventionally—or asked them to endure spartan conditions because of tough times—would dismiss Google’s approach as a spendthrift luxury possible only because of the company’s profitable business model. But Google was convinced that the money was well spent. This raised the question of whether even a cash-strapped corporation might do better by budgeting money to make its employees happier and more productive. Was it possible that such a workforce might be more likely to turn around a troubled company? If you were a highly sought after recruit out of college, how could such a contrast not affect you? If you were an employee who saw evidence every single day that your company valued your presence, would you not be more loyal? The Montessori kids who started Google thought about those questions and asked, Why? Why? Why? If Google ever hits really hard times, it will be telling to see whether the sushi quality falls and the power chargers disappear from the conference rooms.

  Google took its hiring very seriously. Page and Brin believed that the company’s accomplishments sprang from a brew of minds seated comfortably in the top percentile of intelligence and achievement. Page once said that anyone hired at Google should be capable of engaging him in a fascinating discussion should he be stuck at an airport with the employee on a business trip. The implication was that every Googler should converse at the level of Jared Diamond or the ghost of Alan Turing. The idea was to create a charged intellectual atmosphere that makes people want to come to work. It was something that Joe Kraus realized six months after he arrived, when he took a mental survey and couldn’t name a single dumb person he’d met at Google. “There were no bozos,” he says. “In a company this size? That was awesome.”

  Google’s hiring practices became legendary for their stringency. Google’s first head of research, Peter Norvig, once called Google’s approach the “Lake Wobegon Strategy,” which he defined as “only hiring candidates who are above the mean of your current employees.”

  The basic requirements were sky-high intelligence and unquenchable ambition. A more elusive criterion was one’s Googliness. This became explicit one day when Google was only a four-person company, still in Wojcicki’s house, interviewing a prospective fifth. “It was someone we knew from Stanford who we knew was a smart guy,” says Craig Silverstein. Maybe not that smart—he spent the entire interview lecturing the young founders on the mistakes they were making and the opportunity that they had, if they were sharp enough to hire him, to have someone in place to fix all those mistakes. “We really needed to hire people at that point,” says Silverstein. But not at the expense of the culture. After the candidate left, Silverstein noted the obvious: this guy is not one of us. “Everyone understood that early employees set the tone for the company,” he says.

  The Googliness factor was something that Carrie Farrell learned about when she became one of the company’s first engineering recruiters. She joined the company in 2001 and quickly understood that Page and Brin intended to make Google an exalted destination for the computer science elite. “We would have a list of the hundred best engineers around the world, and we basically had to call them and get them in,” she says. But it wasn’t only brilliance that would get a candidate a job at Google. When Farrell went to her first meeting of the hiring council (the group that vetted prospective employees), she assumed that she would present her case and, after a brief discussion, the council would accept her recommendation. Instead, she discovered a group determined not to permit unworthies to pass through the portals of geek heaven. Brin, Jeff Dean, Georges Harik, and other engineers began a tough analysis of the candidate, as if Farrell were peripheral to the discussion. Feeling she should be making a pitch for the candidate, Farrell pointed out her guy’s credentials and coding acumen. They shut her down, saying that all that stuff was in the package. Then, after more heated conversation, they turned back to Farrell and began pelting her with questions: When he talked to the interviewers, what was he like? Good eye contact? Did he seem like a nice guy? Did he seem like someone you’d want to sit next to? Farrell was dazed.

  She came to realize that they were schooling her on how to determine who would fit into Google’s culture. One early employee called it “the Googliness screen.” While the engineers involved in the process would evaluate the test code the candidate had to produce, it was her job to determine whether the person was both creative and sufficiently thick-skinned to defend her stance on a technical or strategic issue. “This is a tough environment,” she says. “People need to know what they’re talking about and be able to defend themselves, to communicate what they’re thinking and feeling.” If a candidate was rude to the receptionist, that was a deal breaker.

  But Google’s practices had a whiff of elitism as well. From the beginning, Google profiled people by which college they had attended. As Page said, “We hired people like us”—brainy strivers from privileged backgrounds who aced the SAT, brought home good grades, and wrote the essays that got them into the best schools. Google sought its employees from Stanford, Berkeley, University of Washington, MIT—the regulars. There were exceptions, but not enough to stop some Googlers from worrying that the workforce would take on an inbred aspect. “You’re going to get groupthink,” warned Doug Edwards, an early marketing hire. “Everybody’s going to have the same background, the same opinions. You need to mix it up.”

  Even more controversial was Google’s insistence on relying on academic metrics for mature adults whose work experience would seem to make college admission test scores and GPAs moot. In her interview for Google’s top HR job, Stacy Sullivan, then age thirty-five, was shocked when Brin and Page asked for her SAT scores. At first she challenged the practice. “I don’t think you should ask something from when people were sixteen or seventeen years old,” she told them. But Page and Brin seemed to believe that Google needed those … data. They believed that SAT scores showed how smart you were. GPAs showed how hard you worked. The numbers told the story.

  It never failed to astoun
d midcareer people when Google asked to exhume those old records. “You’ve got to be kidding,” said R. J. Pittman, thirty-nine years old at the time, to the recruiter who asked him to produce his SAT scores and GPA. He was a Silicon Valley veteran, and Google had been wooing him. “I was pretty certain I didn’t have a copy of my SATs, and you can’t get them after five years or something,” he says. “And they’re, ‘Well, can you try to remember, make a close guess?’ I’m like, ‘Are you really serious?’ And they were serious. They will ask you questions about a grade that you got in a particular computer science class in college: Was there any reason why that wasn’t an A? And you think, ‘What was I doing way back then?’”

  Google persisted in asking for that information even after its own evidence showed that the criteria weren’t relevant to how well people actually performed at Google. The company sometimes even reinvoked undergrad grades when determining the position of Googlers well after their hiring. “They know there’s no correlation between [performance and] where you went to school and your GPA, because we’ve done correlation studies,” says Sullivan. “But we still like to ask, because it is an important data point.”

  Marissa Mayer was a defender of the practice. “A GPA is worth looking at, because it shows an element of diligence,” she says. “Can you meet deadlines, do you have good follow-through? We know that good students will get their work done on time, they’ll get their presentations done, they’ll get their code done right.” A score over 3.5 generally puts you in the clear; between 3.0 and 3.5 generated some concern in Google’s hiring teams. Anything less was serious trouble. And even if your professional résumé shone, a lack of a degree at all was a major handicap. Another midcareer hire, Devin Ivester, who had been a creative director at Apple, thought his hiring was on track when he got a call from his recruiter saying that Google really liked him but there were some blanks in his application—specifically, his college graduation date. “I never graduated,” he said. “I started a business.” “That’s going to be a problem,” she said. That hurdle was overcome only because he had gotten the highest recommendation from an early Googler.