Dining at Google
Last night I met up with Dalban and had a delicious meal at the Cheesecake Factory before heading back to his place in Palo Alto. That was just a prelude to the amazing buffet of "smart water", organic beverages, food, and geek-core tech goodies that surrounded me during my visit to the Google campus today.
Google has a ton of buildings down in Mountain View, CA. We signed in and met up with Dalban's UVic buddy who proceeded to show us just how cool the work environment here is. It's very social, very convenient, and very tempting. I admit that I was filled with a reasonable amount of geek-envy at the multiple 22" widescreen LCD monitors and machines adorning each workstation.The social atmosphere reminded me of my time in highschool when I shared an art studio with Derelict. These days my own team is so often working on disparate projects that we need a weekly bulletin just to realize what each other is doing. Personally, I would love the kind of collaboration that seems so ingrained at the Googleplex.
Benefits that stood out:
- Google shuttle service equipped with wireless Internet to commute from San Francisco
- 20% flex time to work on your own projects
- No questions asked hardware requisitioning; want another 22", no problem
- Smart and motivated co-workers
- Working on some of the illest and newest tech and web solutions
- 360 degree peer reviews influencing bonus payout
- On site haircuts, oil changes, and $5 massages
- Free food, beverages, and electric scooter rides from building to building
- Being able to invite buddies over to "visit" and enjoy the free food too!
Tonight and tomorrow I'll probably head over to the city (San Francisco) to check out the Lunar New Year (it's not really CHINESE new year - other cultures recognize it too) festivities.
One note of caution... if you searched on Google's website today, I might have seen it. You see, they have a wall where they project the current searches people are submitting, filtered for obvious nasty words I assume. It was pretty neat seeing searches coming in from all over the world, it really hit home to me just where I was.
Labels: business trip, California, San Francisco
posted by Blight @ 5:57 PM
6 Comments:
Now I want to Googlefy my office.
Wonder what the employee discount would be on this lamp.
Glad you were able to get an inside look at the place!
Looking forward to some pics of the festivities from ChinaTown
There were lots of these lamps sitting around, I didn't realize they were logoware type stuff.
I feel work envy now. That must have been pretty cool to see that. Too bad other companies won't do that...but then it is a culture thing. It would not work in the culture of our office...that might show trust of the employees...and you can't have that!
Yeah, you do have to hand it to some of these IT companies, they are fairly progressive when it comes to work environments.
Like, a buddy who works for Intuit told me they have nap rooms. Now, that's MY kind of work environment.
sounds great, but I always feel that those kind of companies are just trying to get you to abandon your real life and spend all your time at google.
anyway, sounds like nortel back in the tech boom days. Maybe this is a sign of imminent collapse?
You could be right, it sure seems like with their stock so high they don't have anywhere to go but down... however, I think that their capitalistic work environment helps encourage employees to perform at their best and really rewards for innovation!
We're going to see lots more from Google, trust me.
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