A Google Adventure

This was a very interesting last two days for me. Wednesday I flew down to San Francisco and was driven over to meet some of the folks at Google, Inc.

I know that for me even, Google had a very interesting reputation as a place to work. While Non-disclosure agreements make some things impossible to disclose, I can tell you that as a geeky guy, this place was a lot of fun to be at.

There are so many things to tell that I will try to summarize and get to the main points of some of the coolest things and not dwell on heated toilet seats….yes, heated toilet seats.

Google is a quite sprawling campus. For most of the time we were on the side with the Analytics and Consumer Packaged Goods teams so we were only at the main campus for a short time but that was enough to see why people would want to work there. It’s enough time to make you wonder why people would ever leave. It’s a very college like atmosphere and at a different time in my life I would have already sent in an application and never left!

Google has some interesting principles about work load and creativity. The entire place is meant to make you as comfortable and by that as productive as possible. Food everywhere, snacks, drinks, entertainment, you name it.

I met around a dozen team members and while everyone was very nice, several of the engineers and one guest speaker really were impressive to me. Our lunchtime speaker was Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik. I had never heard of him before, but I left there in search of his book. Be sure to check out his blog for more information, he is a really smart guy with some very succinct thoughts on optimizing and marketing your site.

Dennis Domingo had some really interesting things to show related to Google Earth and Maps, and Brett Goffin really showed me Google’s commitment to being a true advertising powerhouse, not a search engine specialist.

I wish I could tell more about what’s going on, but secrecy is what it is, on to some cool things.

• Employees are always within 100′ of free food and drinks
• Free on site laundry facilities
• Google employees get 20% of their work time to work on personal projects
• Did I mention heated toilet seats? lol
• Macbook Pro and Thinkpad power adapters built into the conference tables
• Free WiFi (obviously)
• Concerts on campus
• Play centers with everything from pool to legos.

That’s by no means an exhaustive list, but gives you an idea of the working environment. The thing that I have to mention is, the people.

If the environment is what breeds the people, it’s working. Every employee I met was bright, articulate, friendly, and simply brilliant. I have not had a more enjoyable time visiting a company that I can remember.

I am sure I will continue to communicate with a few of the people I met there and I really appreciate the experience.

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