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The ‘Google’ Life

Whether we like it or not, “Google” is almost synonymous with “Internet”. Year after year, Google has developed enough online applications for us to be able to do anything you need to, by only using Google Now we have a search engine, an online email service, an IM service, a blogging platform, photo and video sharing applications, a feed reader, an online word processor, an encyclopedia, a web site creator, an online directory and even an Internet browser

Googleplex Facilities



With more than 20 buildings as part of its Mountain Viewheadquarters, finding your way around the Googleplex can be a little intimidating. Many of the employees at Google started work straight out of college. Their young age adds to the impression that you’re on a college campus. The heart of the campus is a group of four buildings: Buildings 40 through 43.
As soon as you walk into a Google lobby, you know you’re not in a typical office environment. Lava lamps provide a groovy vibe and in some lobbies a piano waits for a skilled musician. Most lobbies have a large computer screen that displays search terms in real time as people around the world use Google to find search results. Google filters the stream of terms so that offensive searches don’t pop up at embarrassing moments.
Other interesting decorations you can find in the Google offices range from enormous whiteboards filled with brilliant ideas and irreverent jokes to a replica of SpaceShipOne. There are even interesting items in the hallways. Google advocates a green-conscious and healthy lifestyle among its employees, so it’s not unusual to see bicycles parked in Google buildings.
The offices don’t resemble a typical corporate environment. Google arranges the workstations so that groups of three to four employees who work together sit in the same area. During the design phase, architect Clive Wilkinson faced a challenging problem: how do you group people together and still give them an environment in which they can concentrate on work without distractions? And how do you do it without turning Google into a labyrinth of cubicles?
Wilkinson decided to use glass walls to divide the space into clusters. This design cuts down on much of the ambient noise inside the office. It also allows sunlight to filter in through the entire office. Each glass enclosure has a tent-like roof made of acrylic-coated polyester which contains the room’s lighting and sprinkler systems.
Google executives want employees to be able to bounce ideas off each other. It’s the c­ompany’s hope that by encouraging interaction, workers will have greater job satisfaction and may even create the next big Google product. Employees can personalize their workstations as much as they like, and even bring dogs (but not cats) to work if they want to.
Google’s workspaces may be appealing, but that’s just scratching the surface of the perks at the Googleplex. Some of the perks can lead to undesirable consequences. There’s a dreaded condition called the Google 15 that many new employees grapple with when they first start at the company. 

Google Food for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

One of the most often cited perks of working at Google is the food. Google feeds its employees well. If you work at the Googleplex, you can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner free of charge. There are several cafés located throughout the campus, and employees can eat at any of them. The main café is Charlie’s Place. The café takes its name from Google’s first lead chef, Charlie Ayers. Before creating meals for Googlers, Ayers was the chef for the Grateful Dead.
Although Ayers left Google in 2005, the café still bears his name. The café has several stations, each offering different kinds of cuisine. Options range from vegetarian dishes to sushi to ethnic foods from around the world. Google’s culture promotes the use of fresh, organic foods and healthy meals. But when everything is free and you can eat whenever you want, it’s easy to go overboard. That’s where the Google 15 comes in. It refers to the 15 pounds many new Google employees put on once they start taking advantage of all the meals and snacks.
Other cafés at the Googleplex include the Pacific Café, Charleston Café, Café 150 and the appropriately named No Name Café. Each offers employees several choices for every meal. Google serves up more than 200 recipes in these cafés every day [source: Wu]. 
What if you feel your stomach growling in the middle of the afternoon, but don’t want to trek out to a cafeteria? Google thought of that, too. It’s just a short walk to the nearest snack room- most buildings have them. The snack rooms have candy, granola, chocolate-coated pretzels, juices, coffees and other goodies. All of it is free to employees. Google even brings some of these bins on the road at the 2008 Google I/O event at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif., Google provided bins filled with snacks to attendees.
Google doesn’t discuss how much it spends on its food budget, but that doesn’t stop people from taking a stab at it. Blogger Vasanth Sridharan made one such attempt in April, 2008. He made some educated guesses regarding the number of employees at the Googleplex, the number of meals they eat per day and the amount of money Google would have to spend per employee per day. He came up with a food budget of more than $72 million per year. But then, that’s just a guess [source: Sridharan].

Google Employee Perks

Many tech industry companies in Silicon Valley offer a range of perks and benefits to attract and keep employees. Several offer on-site benefits, which have the added bonus of keeping the employee workforce in the office more often. Give employees enough reasons to stick around and you’ll likely see productivity go up. Why head home when everything you need is at work?
With that in mind, here’s a short list of the perks Google employees get when they sign on at the Googleplex:
If an employee’s bangs are getting in the way during a furious coding session, he or she can schedule an on-site haircut free of charge.
To work off all those calories, employees can head over to a gym filled with equipment. For the aquatically-inclined, Google also provides swim-in-place swimming pools. These pools are narrow and not very long. Electric water pumps provide a strong current that flows in one direction. Employees swim against the current, staying in place within these small pools. Lifeguards are on duty to keep employees safe.
Employees can play against each other in a quick game of ping pong, billiards or foosball — you can find game tables in several of the buildings on campus. There are also video games for employees who prefer to let their thumbs do all the work.

  1. If an employee spills some of that fancy juice on his or her clothes, all is not lost. Google has laundry facilities available to employees on site. The company even offers dry cleaning services. It’s not unusual for Google employees to bring clothes in over the weekend to do laundry at the Googleplex.
  2. Google’s healthcare plan includes on-site medical staff. If an employee suffers an injury or feels ill while at work, he or she can make an appointment with a doctor at the Googleplex.
  3. Even with all the benefits and perks at the Googleplex, work can become stressful. Fortunately for Google employees, they can take advantage of a subsidized massage program. For a small fee, the employee can receive a massage from a licensed therapist in a private room. In fact, Google’s massage rooms and bathrooms are some of the only areas in the Googleplex that have opaque walls.
  4. Another famous benefit of working at Google is the 20 percent time program. Google allows its employees to use up to 20 percent of their work week at Google to pursue special projects. That means for every standard work week, employees can take a full day to work on a project unrelated to their normal workload. Google claims that many of their products in Google Labs started out as pet projects in the 20 percent time program.

Many of Google’s perks appeal to young people fresh out of college. The Googleplex provides a gentle transition from the academic world into the corporate environment. But what about employees who have moved beyond the campus lifestyle? Not all of their benefits have fared as well.
In 2008, one of Google’s perks changed dramatically. The change impacts hundreds of Google employees, and many of them aren’t happy about it. What change in policy could make some Google employees break down in tears? To find out, go to the next section.

Google Benefits and Day Care

Rumors of a Google day care facility sprung up in 2004. A short time later, Google announced a program with the Children’s Creative Learning Centers, Inc (CCLC). A school 2 miles away from the Googleplex hosted the service. In true Google fashion, the company called the day care program the Kinderplex.
The CCLC oversees several day care programs and follows a play-based child care philosophy. The children in the Kinderplex program engaged in various play activities. They also learned yoga as part of an exercise program.

The service was never free, but Google subsidized it so that more Google employees could take advantage of the program. Part of the subsidy went toward meals: Kids received free breakfast, lunch and snacks at the center. Google leveraged the Kinderplex as part of its benefits program when recruiting prospective employees.
A year after opening the Kinderplex, Google established a second program called the Woods. Unlike the Kinderplex, Google ran the Woods program itself. The Woods took a different approach to caring for children than the Kinderplex. It was also more expensive to maintain.
In 2008, Google decided to change its day care service to make the entire program more like the Woods. The new program will cost employees more than twice as much as the old one. According to several reports, some Google employees were moved to tears at the announcement. Why the sudden hike in price?
One reason is due to the style of learning. While the Kinderplex focused on play-based learning, the new child care program follows the Reggio Emilia philosophy. Founded by Loris Malaguzzi, this approach depends upon each individual child. As the child begins to show interests in particular activities or subjects, the teacher adjusts the program to give the child more access to those things. Communication and interaction are important, as are aesthetic concerns like the physical surroundings and artwork in the room.
Class sizes are small and the teachers have relatively high salaries. The wait list to get into Google’s day care program is hundreds of names long. Google is now charging parents to stay on the waiting list. Coupled with the new higher prices for day care, the list’s length has decreased over time. Some people within Google argue that the only people who can afford in-house day care now are top level executives.
Discussions regarding the day care situation are likely to continue. Google’s programs usually receive an equal mixture of praise and awe. The day care program is a rare example of an internal Google initiative that draws criticism.
Most of the Googleplex’s facilities and programs continue to attract potential employees. While Google may have hit a speed bump in the day care program, other initiatives still garner positive attention. The Googleplex and its programs help put Google at the top of Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list in 2008 [source: Fortune]. There’s no shortage of people wanting to join Google’s ranks. And once they get there, they might discover that they don’t want to leave. That’s just how Google likes it.

How Google keeps its workers happy?



A few years ago, Google’s human resources department noticed a problem: a lot of women were leaving the company. Like the majority of Silicon Valley software firms, Google is staffed mostly by men, and executives have long made it a priority to increase the number of female employees. But the fact that women were leaving Google wasn’t just a gender equity problem – it was affecting the bottom line. Unlike in most sectors of the economy, the market for top-notch tech employees is stretched incredibly thin. Google fights for potential workers with Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and hordes of start-ups, so every employee’s departure triggers a costly, time-consuming recruiting process.
Then there was the happiness problem. Google monitors its employees’ wellbeing to a degree that can seem absurd to those who work outside Mountain View. The attrition rate among women suggested there might be something amiss in the company’s happiness machine. And if there’s any sign that joy among Googlers is on the wane, it’s the Google HR department’s mission to figure out why and how to fix it.
Google calls its HR department People Operations, though most people in the firm shorten it to POPS. The group is headed by Laszlo Bock, a trim, soft-spoken 40-year-old who came to Google six years ago. Bock says that when POPS looked into Google’s woman problem, it found it was really a new mother problem: Women who had recently given birth were leaving at twice Google’s average departure rate. At the time, Google offered an industry-standard maternity leave plan. After a woman gave birth, she got 12 weeks of paid time off. For all other new parents in its Californiaoffices, but not for its workers outside the state, the company offered seven paid weeks of leave.
So in 2007, Bock changed the plan. New mothers would now get five months off at full pay and full benefits, and they were allowed to split up that time however they wished, including taking some of that time off just before their due date. If she likes, a new mother can take a couple months off after birth, return part-time for a while, and then take the balance of her time off when her baby is older. Plus, Google began offering the seven weeks of new-parent leave to all its workers around the world.
Google’s lavish maternity and paternity leave plans probably don’t surprise you. The company’s swank perks – free gourmet food, on-site laundry, Wi-Fi commuting shuttles – are legendary in the corporate world, and they’ve driven a culture of ever-increasing luxuries for tech workers. This week, for the fourth consecutive year, Google was named the best company to work for by Fortune magazine; Microsoft was No. 75, while Apple, Amazon, and Facebook didn’t even make the list.
At times Google’s largesse can sound excessive  noble but wasteful from a bottom-line perspective. In August, for example, Forbes disclosed one previously unannounced Google perk – when an employee dies, the company pays his spouse or domestic partner half of his salary for a decade. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that Google doles out such perks just to be nice. POPS rigorously monitors a slew of data about how employees respond to benefits, and it rarely throws money away. The five-month maternity leave plan, for instance, was a winner for the company. After it went into place, Google’s attrition rate for new mothers dropped down to the average rate for the rest of the firm. “A 50 per cent reduction – it was enormous!” Bock says. What’s more, happiness – as measured by Googlegeist, a lengthy annual survey of employees – rose as well. Best of all for the company, the new leave policy was cost-effective. Bock says that if you factor in the savings in recruitment costs, granting mothers five months of leave doesn’t cost Google any more money.
The change in maternity leave exemplifies how POPS has helped Google become the country’s best employer. Under Bock, Google’s HR department functions more like a rigorous science lab than the pesky hall monitor most of us picture when we think of HR. At the heart of POPS is a sophisticated employee-data tracking program, an effort to gain empirical certainty about every aspect of Google’s workers’ lives – not just the right level of pay and benefits but also such trivial-sounding details as the optimal size and shape of the cafeteria tables and the length of the lunch lines.
In the past couple years, Google has even hired social scientists to study the organisation. The scientists – part of a group known as the PiLab, short for People & Innovation Lab – run dozens of experiments on employees in an effort to answer questions about the best way to manage a large firm. How often should you remind people to contribute to their retirement savings, and what tone should you use? Do successful middle managers have certain skills in common – and can you teach those skills to unsuccessful managers? Or, for that matter, do managers even matter – can you organise a company without them? And say you want to give someone a raise – how should you do it in a way that maximises his happiness? Should you give him a cash bonus? Stock? A raise? More time off?
Some of Google’s HR lessons won’t apply to other companies. The search company has been insanely profitable for much of its history, and many of its problems are atypical. Google has the luxury of worrying about the best way to give people more money instead of, say, the ideal manner in which to lay them off. Still, a few of POPS’ findings – like how to train a better core of managers and how to improve interviews – will apply to most other firms. And among the tech giants – many of which are also quite profitable and face some of the same problems Google does – the search company is alone in trying to answer its HR questions scientifically. “We make thousands of people decisions every day – who we should hire, how much we should pay them, who we should promote, who we should let go of,” says Prasad Setty, who heads POPS’s “people analytics” group. “What we try to do is bring the same level of rigour to people decisions that we do to engineering decisions. Our mission is to have all people decisions be informed by data.” 
This effort to bring rigor to HR grew out of Google’s larger culture. Most of its workers are engineers, the kind of people who demand data to get them to change their ways. One of the earliest examples of this was POPS’s effort to streamline Google’s hiring process. In its first few years, Google became infamous in the Valley for asking prospective candidates to endure lots and lots of interviews. “The intuition was that staffing was everything for Google, so everyone at the firm should be able to interview a candidate,” Bock says.
The people in HR were sceptical of this approach; not only was the interview process slowing down hiring, it was also harming Google’s reputation among prospective candidates. So Todd Carlisle, who is now Google’s director of staffing, did a study to find the optimal number of times a candidate should be interviewed. He analysed dozens of Google’s hiring decisions, keeping track of the scores that each interviewer had given a candidate after an interview. After crunching the data, Carlisle found that the optimal interview rate – the number of interviews after which the candidate’s average score would converge on his final score – was four. “After four interviews,” Carlislesays, “you get diminishing returns.” Presented with this data, Google’s army of engineers was convinced. Interview times shrunk, and Google’s hiring sped up.
Google’s HR department has uncovered many such nuggets of optimal organisational behaviour. Among the biggest finding is that middle managers matter, which overturned Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s onetime presumption that you could run a company in which nobody was the boss of anyone else. POPS determined this by looking at scores the firm’s managers received from two-sided feedback surveys, taking into account both what a manager’s underlings and a manager’s manager thinks about his work. When analysts compared the highest- and lowest-performing managers, they found a stark difference the best managers had lower attrition rates (meaning fewer people left their teams), and their teams were much more productive across a range of criteria.
“We were able to show them that those pointy-headed Dilbert caricatures actually make a difference to their jobs,” says Jennifer Kurkoski, a PiLab analyst. More importantly, the analysts were able to use their findings to make bad managers better. After scouring the feedback that successful managers got from their teams, the researchers boiled it all down to eight bullet points. They sound obvious and overly vague “A high-scoring manager is a good coach,” “a good communicator,” “doesn’t micromanage” but the bullet points worked: When POPS spread these truths through the organisation and targeted unsuccessful managers for coaching, they found that the company’s managerial ranks improved. As a result of the coaching, Google managers’ collective feedback scores have improved every year since 2009.
Another major POPS finding concerned how to give an employee more money. In 2010, buffeted by the recession and increasing competition from other companies (especially Facebook), then-CEO Eric Schmidt decided to give all Googlers a raise. It was the job of POPS to determine the best way to offer that increase. The group ran a “conjoint survey” in which it asked employees to choose the best among many competing pay options. For instance, would you rather have $1000 more in salary or $2000 as a bonus?
“What we found was that they valued base pay above all,” Setty says. “When we offered a bonus of X, they valued that at what it costs us. But if you give someone a dollar in base pay, they value it at more than a dollar because of the long-term certainty.” In 2010, Schmidt announced that all Google employees would get a 10 per cent salary increase. Setty says Googlers were overjoyed – many people cite that announcement as their single happiest moment at the firm, and Googlegeist numbers that year went through the roof. Attrition to competing companies also declined.
Then there are the smaller findings: To nudge someone to contribute to his retirement account, POPS found that it’s best if you send him many reminders and that it’s better if your reminders call for “aggressive” savings goals. If you implore an employee to contribute $8000 to his retirement rather than, say, $2000, he’ll tend to save more – even if he can’t afford $8000, he’ll put in more than he would have if you’d suggested $2000. As for the cafeterias, researchers found that the ideal lunch line should be about three or four minutes long – that’s short enough that people don’t waste time but long enough that they can meet new people. The tables should be long, so workers who don’t know each other are forced to chat. And, after running an experiment, Google found that stocking cafeterias with 20-centimetre plates alongside 30-centimetre plates encouraged people to eat smaller, healthier portions.
Bock’s ultimate goal is to use Google’s experience to answer some big questions about the workplace: Are leaders born or made? Are teams better than individuals at getting things done? Can individuals sustain high performance over their lifetimes? POPS isn’t close to being able to answer those questions right now, but Bock argues that Google can eventually shed light on some of them. “We have the luxury of being a data-driven company with people with the analytic chops who can do the math,” he says. “We also have a large enough scale so that when we run experiments, they’re statistically valid.”
In time, Bock argues, Google’s findings – which it often shares with other HR professionals – may improve all our jobs. “You spend more time working than doing anything else,” he says. “If you work eight or 10 hours a day, it’s more time than you spend sleeping, more time than you spend with your spouse. When you add it up it gets really depressing. You like your job, but for all time it should be – and it could be – something more. So why isn’t it?”


Google is Making You Dumber  


When it comes to the Internet, it just doesn’t get much bigger than Google. In the United States, Google consistently gobbles up 70 to 75 percent of the search engine market [source: Garner]. In places like the United Kingdom, Switzerland and South America, that number soars to more than 90 percent of the market share [source: Google Operating System].
Google has conquered the search engine world so completely that its very name is synonymous with Internet search. How many companies (besides Xerox, of course) are recognized by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as a verb?
Success on this scale is bound to attract some attention, and Google’s success has garnered a lot of it. In fact, an enthusiastic press corps and caffeine-fueled blogosphere scrutinize Google’s every move. Is Google buying Twitter? Is it going to launch its own cell phone network? Is it thinking about removing blueberries from the Google cafeteria’s fruit salad?
If any of these rumors sound too weird to believe, don’t take our word for it. Google it.
YouTube is one of many wildly popular Google properties.
Google offers a ridiculous number of online services. There’s the flagship Google search engine, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google News, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Calendar, just to scratch the surface. Then there are popular Google-owned Web sites like YouTube, Picasa and Blogger. All of these services are absolutely free.
So, how does Google make money? Does it make money at all? Since Google’s debut, a persistent rumor asserts that the company has no business model and therefore makes no profit. That’s one seriously misguided myth.
In 2008, Google made nearly $22 billion [source: Google]. Ninety-seven percent of the company’s revenue came from advertising. How did they pull this off? Google has developed two highly profitable advertising models: Google AdWords and Google AdSense.

AdWords are the advertisements that appear during Google searches above and beside the main search results. They’re labeled as “Sponsored Links.” Advertisers can use AdWords to write short text ads and tag them with keywords. Google then uses complicated algorithms to find the most relevant ads for certain Google searches.
The advertiser doesn’t pay Google each time his or her ad is shown. He or she only pays when someone clicks on his or her ad. Click-through costs can be as low as 10 cents, so it’s not a steep investment for advertisers. But for Google, all of those dimes add up quickly.
AdSense works in a similar way, but the text ads surface on non-Google Web sites. If you run a Web site and want to earn a little advertising revenue, you can sign up with AdSense. Google uses its algorithms to show pertinent ads to site visitors. Every time a visitor clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays Google 10 cents or $20, depending on the popularity of a particular keyword. Google then gives you, the Web site owner, a small slice of that fee.
Keep in mind that all of that revenue isn’t pure profit: After a year of investment losses and general economic havoc, Google turned a profit of $4 billion in 2008. In the final quarter of 2008, however, it experienced its first-ever drop in quarterly profit [source: Liedtke].

YOUR BRAIN ON GOOGLE

The Google founders are gaga over artificial intelligence. In a 2004 interview, Sergey Brin riffed on the possibility of a Google implant. No word yet on Google Brain (Beta) [source: Orlowski].
What’s the capital of Uruguay? Who was the first female NASA astronaut? What exactly is Newton’s Second Law of Motion? Oh, that’s easy! Google. Google. Google.
Believe it or not, there was a time when the world expected you to actually remember and analyze those dates, facts and other bits of highly forgettable information you were taught in high school. Now, instead of long-term memory and intelligence, we have a search box.
This idea raises a provocative question: Does Google really make us dumber or have we as a global society simply changed the definition of “smart?”
A recent article in The Atlantic Monthly points out that people have been blaming technology for our downwardly spiraling intelligence since day one. Socrates bemoaned the invention of the written word, saying it would cause humans to become forgetful [source: Carr]. The printing press sparked outcry over the democratization of knowledge and its degrading effect on religious belief.
The Internet also has its critics. Studies show that the Internet has caused some clear shifts in the way we process information [source: Rich]. In the online realm, skimming, link-jumping and other nonlinear reading is more common than digesting long sections of text, as we would in a book or magazine. Critics argue that our growing disinterest in reading longer passages of text means we can’t think critically about a subject [source: Carr].
Defenders of the Internet make the opposite argument: Google has made us infinitely more intelligent by giving us instant access to all the world’s collective knowledge [source: Grier]. They argue that Google is the smart solution to a technologically “dumb” and outdated library system [source: Polaine]. With Google, we can gather up-to-the-minute information from myriad sources with blazing speed.

“Google is almost synonymous with Internet”

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