"Your mothers must be so proud," a user told us. "I want my son to work at Google."
We received more letters of praise when we did the same thing the following year, but we also received pointed questions about why there weren't any African-American moms depicted. We answered that not all staff members were represented—but it was the last time our mothers put in an appearance.
Sometimes the artwork itself misfired. "Why do you have a turkey, a turtle, and a thermometer on your logo?" users asked when Dennis celebrated the Japanese holiday Shichi-Go-San with a crane, a turtle, and a traditional candy bag.
"Why does King Neptune have a boner?" Several users noted an unfortunate tenting in Poseidon's toga during a logo series Dennis did for the Olympics that featured figures from Greek mythology.
"Your anti-Christian political correctness is showing." "Your hemisphericentric world view is apparent." We heard both these complaints about the snowy "winter holiday" scenes we ran instead of Christmas-specific artwork. Australians in particular wanted to make it very plain to us that December is the middle of their summer and hence winter scenes on our homepage made us look uninformed, uncaring, or both.
"Where's your patriotism?" other users demanded. "You celebrate Chinese New Year, but not [pick one]: Memorial Day, Veterans Day, D-Day, V-J Day, Presidents' Day." We wanted the logos to be unpredictable and special, but eventually they took on a life of their own with a complicated set of rules governing what we would commemorate and whom we would honor. That came later. For the first couple of years, Dennis and Karen and I had free rein to pick and choose, which is why Korean Liberation Day made the list twice before Australia Day. Yo, Dennis—represent, Seoul brother.
Good Enough Is Good Enough
"Do you know what our greatest corporate expense is?" Sergey asked at TGIF. The assembled Googlers looked up from their laptops. Everyone wanted the chance to be right in front of others.
"Health insurance!" shouted an engineer. "Salaries!" "Servers!" "Taxes!" "Electricity!" "Charlie's grocery bills!" rejoined others.
"No," said Sergey, shaking his head solemnly. "Opportunity cost."
Products we weren't launching and deals we weren't doing threatened our economic stability far more than any single line item in the budget. We were falling behind even as we leapt ahead. Success was spilling through our fingers. This was Sergey's rallying cry to redouble our efforts. I heard it, but sometimes I had a hard time answering.
After six months on the job, I had plenty on my plate, and I swept away my daily tasks like an umpire brushing away the dust of a home-bound slide. Big amorphous projects, though, like reorganizing all the corporate information pages or developing a banner-ad strategy for our trade partners, I just couldn't find time to complete.
If I wasn't responding to coworker requests, sitting in meetings, or flicking my mouse at emails infesting my inbox, I was being seduced by the rustle of M&Ms each time someone dipped a scoop into the bin across the hall. Kitchen aromas suffused my senses until I was compelled to pore over the lunch menu and plan my noon repast. There was always someone up for after-dinner Soul Calibur in the Blue Room, and the sauna beckoned when the pressure got intense—I could think about all the tasks piling up on my desk as freshly made Italian coffee dripped out of my pores.
At the Merc, I had never felt a pang when making personal calls on my office phone, because, I mean, just look at the dearth of perks they offered. A discounted subscription to our own newspaper? Gee. Thanks. At Google, I was in worker's paradise, but I felt I didn't deserve it. I was putting in way more hours than I had at the Merc, but it never seemed enough to justify the bounty the company was bestowing upon me. As dot-coms slipped into insolvency all around us, I was constantly reminded how lucky I was, not only to have a job, but to have such a great job. Survivor's guilt tormented me. Yes, I was cranking out great volumes of material, but I wasn't pushing us quickly enough toward a global marketing strategy. Cindy knew it. She made it clear she wanted more urgency, more big ideas, more leadership from me. She was right: I could, I should do more. My days stretched longer. I hung around in the dark (but hardly empty) Googleplex forcing myself to be productive. Was I the only one feeling this insecure?
"I don't know if I can last here a year," search-quality guru Ben Gomes thought to himself after starting his first hard assignment. "I hope I can make it. I want to reach my vesting cliff." Gomes survived. "A few months later I started working on ranking," he recalls. "I was here till four a.m. and coming back at ten in the morning. My entire life was here. It was great. I really enjoyed it."*
The hours and the intensity fostered a sense of camaraderie among the night shift, especially when Larry and Sergey held court in their offices. They were so much easier to spot in the moonlight, stripped of the protective cover provided by blocked-out calendars. Meetings devoured daylight, but seven p.m. opened broad vistas of uninterrupted uptime. I could brew a fifth cup of coffee and face down the monstrosities lurking in forsaken corners of my to-do list. But first...
"Daddy? When are you coming home, Daddy?" one of the kids would croon as soon as I called the house. "I miss you and I want to see you." Kristen wasn't above fighting dirty in the war for my attention. "I love you Daaaddy."
How could I blame her? While I snuggled in the bosom of my new Google family, she picked up the parental duties I shirked. Playing pattycake, making macaroni, kissing boo-boos, and keeping the roof securely fastened on our little bungalow next door to a guy doing home-based auto repairs. All while lecturing local college students on Russian avant-garde cinema and Persian poetry of the thirteenth century.
My previous jobs had been in public broadcasting and newspapers, both infamous for obscenely inflated compensation packages, so money was never an issue unless we needed to buy something. Kristen didn't play the martyr, though I could discern her doubts.
"He was just ready to try something new," I heard her tell a friend on the phone. "It's Google. No. Goo-gle. Gooooo-gle. Like a baby sucking a pacifier. Yes, it's a real company. Well, not as real as the newspaper was..."
The feeling that I was failing at home while underachieving in a spectacular way at work shook me. There were so many things I could be doing better in both places that I started parsing my schedule into thirty-second segments and communicating in sentence fragments.
"Adam! Out of bed, dressed, and ready to go in ninety seconds." Adam was eleven. "Nathaniel. Bathroom? Socks and shoes in the car. Pants too." Nathaniel was six. "Avalon. Diapee?" Avalon was one.
Surprisingly, children are not onboard with that mode of interaction. I had to force myself to remember that the goal of being a father is not to download a set of instructions, check for understanding, and then move on to the next task on an endless list.
Meanwhile, status requests showed up in my inbox at midnight asking about assignments handed out five hours earlier. Instant messages arrived minutes later.
"Just wondering. Where are you with the text for the browser buttons? We need to check in the code in an hour."
If one task fell behind schedule, the project circling behind would sink lower and lower until it slid to a fiery end on a foam-covered runway. I wanted to take the time to do everything right—polish the prose and perfect the text, double-check the targeting, and drop it precisely on the intended audience. The engineers wanted to shove stuff out the window when it was still a mile away from where it should be.
"Good enough is good enough" was the standard Urs set for engineering. In those five words he encapsulated a philosophy for solving problems, cutting through complexity, and embracing failure. It should be stitched into the fabric of every cubicle at Google. It drove Google's software development, the heart and soul of the company's technology.
"When you have a list that's longer than you can deal with, you have to prioritize," Urs instructed us. "If you give a project a quick improvement that gets you eighty percent of the way to solving the problem, you haven't solved it, but it drops bel
ow the line versus one you haven't worked on at all." And then he put his finger on the crux of my conflicts with engineering. "Once a problem falls below the line you should work on something else, even though it's not finished."
How the hell could I stop working on something when it wasn't finished? The whole world would see scratches in our metal-flake paint and dings in the door panels of our corporate identity. The shame!
"Even if something starts big, it decays in importance as you work on it because you fix some parts of it," Urs informed me. "At some point all the problems above the line that are really important are being worked on. That is my definition of success: if you do a good job hiring, you get the luxury of actually doing it right and the luxury of going far beyond what you 'need to do.'"*
I touched on the importance of hiring back in the Introduction, and I'll touch on it again in the pages that follow. Urs made it clear that adding talented staff cured everything but male-pattern baldness. Larry and Sergey agreed—as long as the new staffers' talents lay in the technical realm. I was able to hire a marketing coordinator, but for a long time the only bodies added to Cindy's group worked on public relations. That meant I had plenty to do updating the content of our website while overseeing our ad partnerships, affiliate program, and user-support service.
Larry and Sergey wanted to keep Google's ratio of engineers to non-engineers at fifty-fifty, but in the dot-com feeding frenzy the pickings were slim. And hiring was the one area in which Urs would accept nothing less than perfection. "In April 2000," he told me, we didn't make a single offer. Our plan was to hire three to four people per month. We asked, 'Did we make a mistake? Maybe we're too tough? We can't succeed if we don't get people in.' We looked at all of them and said, 'No, actually, this was the right decision.'"
Fortunately (for almost no one but Google), the dot-com bubble burst the following month. Coders suddenly warmed up to cold calls from recruiters, and Urs began collecting résumés that matched the profile of a good Google engineer.
"Nobody had experience with search engines," Urs recalls. "What was most important was what else they had done, how good they were technically, and how quickly they could learn." He dictated a mantra to Google's HR staff: "Hire ability over experience."* Brilliant generalists could reprogram themselves like stem cells within the corporate body: they would solve a problem, then morph and move on to attack the next challenge.
"The key thing," Urs said, "was that they be able to independently make progress, because there wasn't much room for babysitting. They had to have good judgment about whether to coordinate or not."
Google generalists needed a firm grasp, not just of coding, but of the hardware and performance issues essential to scaling the search engine. Most recent computer science grads didn't have that breadth of knowledge, but Urs and the founders remained adamant that offers be extended only to those who could retool quickly. "It was too hard to predict where the next fire would be," Urs explained. "If you only know how to do A and it turns out the company moves in a way that A isn't important anymore, you have an intrinsic reaction to argue that we must do A. If you're a generalist, you're much less threatened by that. Instead, it's, 'Fine. Great. Here's something else to do that's exciting!'"
That expectation applied to everyone at Google. I was to identify key issues, then solve them or learn how to solve them. Saying "I can't do that, because I don't know how" revealed a deficiency of initiative, flexibility, and perhaps even IQ. It was a shock to my sense of the way an office operated. I'd worked mainly in union shops, where grievances were filed if you tried to do a task that "belonged" to someone else. I once flicked the wall switch in an empty TV studio and was scolded because studio lights could only be turned on by a member of NABET. When I worked at ad agencies, media buyers didn't write copy, copywriters didn't talk to clients, account people didn't buy TV time. It would have violated the natural order.
Matt Cutts, who carved out a niche attacking the porn and spam that degraded search results, summed up our staffing philosophy this way: "It works pretty well if you hire really smart people who are flexible and can get things done. Then just throw them into the deep end of the pool."
What you had studied in school wasn't relevant. What you had been doing at your previous job didn't matter. Once you waded into Google's sea of needs, someone tossed you a project and you were expected to grab it. Either you learned how to swim with it or it sank you.
It Goes without Saying
Even though Urs had an unhealthy fixation on hiring, he seemed like an upright guy who thought beyond the black and white of "Can we do it?" to the murkier question "Should we do it, just because we can?" I was impressed with the stand he took on RealNames, but I didn't realize that his fundamentalist views on absolute honesty had a dark side, one that seeped into the company culture and cast a shadow over working collaboratively.
"Urs was rather sparse with his praise," as systems guy Ben Smith diplomatically put it. Smith* wasn't much of a talker himself. Not aggressively reticent, just coolly laconic. A world-class Ultimate Frisbee player, Smith had the intensity of athletic confidence wrapped around an intellect capable of solving Google's most intransigent grit-in-the-gears software problems. Steve McQueen with a PhD, maybe.
"I had written up detailed instructions," Smith told me about a piece of notoriously unreliable software he had been up all night trying to fix. "I explained to Urs before I left, 'Here's what we've done. Here's how it's running. Here are the things to look at. Here's what's going to go wrong if it goes wrong, and here are ten steps you need to do to turn it off.' I was driving home, listening to Morning Edition, and I get a call from Urs. 'It broke like you said it would,' he says. 'I fixed it. Good work.' It was like, 'Your directions worked. Thank you for not completely screwing us over.'"
"Urs was people-challenged in just the funniest way," engineer Ron Dolin confirmed. "He didn't give compliments. If you were doing a good job, that's enough said. But some of us—especially the ones who were not the supermen of the company—could have used a little encouragement here or there."
So why was Urs so parsimonious with his accolades? Is it just that engineers are tight-lipped? "I don't think there's an engineering aversion to praise," Urs replied when I asked about our compliment-free culture. "It's one of my biggest management problems. Myself, I don't need effusive praise. I didn't grow up like that and it doesn't come naturally."
The language barrier contributed to Urs's reticence to laud his team. "'Good' in German really means 'good,'" he explained. "Here it means 'not really that good, but not bad yet.' In German, you wouldn't say 'excellent' almost ever. You'd say 'very good,' because the highest mark at school was 'very good.' That's the best there is. 'Excellent' maybe means Olympic caliber. Not what normal people would achieve. That was always a little bit of a challenge."
Urs not only had trouble giving compliments, he had a hard time accepting them as well. "My advisor at Stanford would tell me that things were 'great,'" he once confided with a grimace, "and I knew it wasn't all great and I had trouble understanding. In Switzerland, you'd say, 'This is bad, and this is bad, and this is bad. And why did you do this? This is not going to work.' And here it's like, 'Do you think that ... maybe you could... ?'"
Urs acknowledged to me that his attitude created problems. "I'm not really proud of that," he said, "because we had really excellent people. It's easy to forget, because there are problems everywhere, and obviously you focus on problems, because that's what needs to be fixed, right? But that can come across as 'everything's bad,' right? When in fact things are great." And then, because, after all, he was Urs, he added, "Except there still are problems."
The tone set by Urs in engineering was the tone for all of Google. The company stacked its payroll with high achievers unaccustomed to going unacknowledged, and despite the stock options and the free food, they often felt underappreciated. At the same time, many felt unsure of their own contributions or where they stood in relation to their p
eers.
For my own ego nourishment, I deciphered different types of feedback I received and developed an interpretative scale of success. Ordered from "Can I double-check your SAT scores?" to "I don't think that would have occurred to me," it went like this:
It's a waste of time.
It's not worth talking about.
It doesn't offend me.
It will do until we can fix it.
It seems reasonable.
It seems sensible.
It's kind of interesting.
I also developed a personal theory about why encouragement to improve productivity came easily but effusive praise proved elusive. It wasn't that people didn't expect and appreciate exceptional performance, or that coworkers and managers were too envious to note a job well done. Just the opposite. If you assumed all your colleagues were at Google because of their skill and intelligence, calling attention to their success might be insulting—as if you were surprised that they had done what was expected.
I took some comfort from that notion, specious though it may have been, because I didn't want to dwell on the alternative possibility—that I was hearing so little praise because no one thought I actually deserved it.
What? Me Worry?
The fear of falling behind churned my stomach and tattered my sleep. Not so for Urs. Despite the massive load Larry and Sergey had placed on his shoulders, at the end of a full day he could let things be. "I've always had the ability to accept that there's stuff that I can't deal with right now," he said. "And I don't feel bad about it because I know I made the best use of my time. People are going to laugh when they hear this, but it's actually easier for me to accept failure or imperfection than for other people—if it's there for a good reason."
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Page 16