The other day I paid a visit to Google’s vast New York office complex to have lunch with my friend Greg, a former co-worker who took a job there about a year ago.
As you’d imagine, it’s not your ordinary workplace. Everywhere you look, there are comforts, amusements, and diversions: toys, jungle rooms, sleeping pods, whiskey bars, fitness equipment, lavishly stocked little kitchens, a full-surround Google Earth viewing booth, fabulous sculptures made of Legos and K’Nex, “jam rooms” equipped with musical instruments, and so on. Workers come and go as they please, and are fed gratis at any of several outstanding cafeterias. Dress is completely informal, and everybody gets one day each week to work on whatever they like. There’s hardly any supervision or hierarchy — people just sort of understand what’s needed, and know their job is to make it happen in the cleverest way they can.
Everyone I met assumed I was there for an interview, and couldn’t help telling me what a fantastic place it was to work.
It being a mild day, Greg and I dined al fresco on a high terrace with a sweeping view of Midtown. (I had a delightful osso buco, he some freshly made sushi.) We talked about what his new life was like. Yes, he said, the physical perks were nice, but what really made the place so extraordinary was “the culture”.
His use of that word crystallized for me the effect the place had had on me from the moment I walked in. To get there, I had taken the subway from Grand Central down to 14th Street and 8th Avenue (two subways, actually), and the experience was as it is always is: crowded, blaring, gritty, and above all maximally heterogeneous in every way imaginable. It’s “vibrant”, if you like, and after living here in Gotham for more than thirty years I’m certainly well accustomed to it — but the effect of such a volatile and discordant public environment is to produce in everyone a subliminal wary tension, so constant and so routine that after a while one hardly notices it until it’s gone.
Well, when you walk into Google, it’s gone. Coming into that place, through the high-tech security checkpoint, from the teeming city outside is like passing through an airlock; it’s like beaming back up to the Enterprise from the steamy planetary surface. You can’t help being aware that you are suddenly in what feels like a different country. It’s culture shock.
Just how, exactly, is it so different? Well, it’s not the the creature comforts: for all its toys and free lunches, the place has nothing on a good hotel. It’s the people. Unlike any government or academic institution, Google is a pure meritocracy. Its employees have jumped a series of very high bars to get in the door, and as a result this building houses one of the most elite concentrations of high IQ in the world. En masse, it’s palpable. You can’t help but notice.
Greg said that he sometimes feels, working at Google, that he’s living in a “bubble” — and sitting on that terrace with all those bright people, looking out over New York City and enjoying my osso buco, I had to agree that he’s right. I realized that what Google has done is to create a one-way membrane, a kind of Maxwell’s Demon: as the world decays and degenerates outside, falling further into chaos, the entropy inside the Google membrane decreases, as self-organizing complexity emerges. That’s what Greg’s “bubble” is, and that’s what makes the “culture” possible: an extreme statistical outlier at the end of a long series of centrifuges.
Another friend (and another very smart guy) who now works at Google is my old boss from PubSub, Bob Wyman. I chatted briefly with him, too, while I was visiting. Bob has an interesting paradigm for thinking about the world. The way he sees it, good and evil are basically just a matter of thermodynamics. In a nutshell, good consists of reducing entropy, and evil consists of abetting it.
Google’s motto: Don’t be evil.
I hear they’re hiring…
9 Comments
Your friend Bob’s paradigm for good and evil is also my way of thinking about creativity and destruction. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which specifies that the entropy of a closed system goes up, guarantees that it is much more difficult to create order than to destroy it. It is why the louts of this world are generally bent on destruction, as well as on redistribution of wealth by fiat.
I’ve always liked Google’s motto, but have never liked their failure to adhere to it in places like China, where they abet the reinforcement of the Great Firewall. (Google protests, naturally, that it’s not colluding with the Chinese government in the repression of its own people. Uh-huh.)
That said, Malcolm, your write-up about Google makes me want to spend three weeks in Manhattan, then end my stay by visiting Google so as to feel a bit of that culture shock.
My last job was for a company located in the middle of the Google campus in Mountain View. We inhabited the space where Mozilla started, and the building became the hole as Google became the donut surrounding it. Driving around the campus — which is roughly the same size as Princeton or Harvard — is extraordinary. You get the feeling that if Einstein were alive today, he’d be working there too.
Big Al would certainly have liked the babes and the casual dress code (sweatshirts, socks optional, etc.). Not sure if he could live without a blackboard and chalk, however.
On the way up to SF, we popped into both the Google hq and the Apple hq. Google gave us free Odwalla juices (MSRP: $2.95/each). Apple gave us nothing.
Hmmm.
I’m happy you’re happy Malcolm with your visit. Being here in Arkansas fresh sushi isn’t necessarily a manifestation of any sort of “meritocracy” – fresh sushi is more usually obtained by slamming the brakes immediately following a leading driver’s failure to realize he’s run over an armadillo. (Of course our local NASCAR drivers do have an advantage which I suppose could be reckoned to be “merit-based”.)
[What else could account for Google’s China success?]
“…good and evil are basically just a matter of thermodynamics. In a nutshell, good consists of reducing entropy, and evil consists of abetting it.”
America’s National Security Administration is hiring too – as is DHS – China of course though I’ve no clue whether “…sculptures made of Legos and K’Nex…” would be major attractants. But given their long history manufacturing puzzle-boxes…
Regardless Malcolm – reads like you thoroughly enjoyed your day. I’m glad to’ve read it. “Fresh sushi” as a job benefit – my ol’ friend Steg knows now where to supplement his retirement.
By all means, Kevin, do come up for a visit, and we can pop in on Greg for lunch.
As I recall, Google’s position was that is was better for them to be there at all than withdraw in a huff. (Certainly better as far as the bottom line is concerned…)
Yes, Henry, a farmer I knew once summed up the Second Law by saying “Any jackass can kick down a barn.”
I like it. Could make a good rallying cry for conservatives, too.