Life at Google

Finally a blog i have waited 2 long months to start writing. Not because i am lazy but because i did not want to write about my new job while i was still in the honeymoon period.

Well first of all a lot of people ask me to compare Google to other companies, and while i don't know much about other companies, Google has a different way with employees which i haven't seen in any other company as i shall try to explain in the remainder of this blog.

Like a lot of people i had heard a lot about Googly and the cynic i am the more i heard the less i believed. But this is one case where i think reality is not far from the hype.

Firstly and most importantly is the work culture which is very flat and agile, nice words but what do they mean and what's the catch you may ask, Glad you asked! What that means is that engineers here enjoy a great degree of freedom when it comes to actual design and project planning. The philosophy here is they hire selectively and then make the engineers directly responsible for the success of a project, and then they have to decide what it takes to do that.
These decisions could range from actually defining what needs to be done, how to do it and more importantly the resources required to do it. Managerial supervision is minimal and is often restricted to reviews.

Another thing which i like here is the emphasis on continuous education built into the policy framework ( there was actually a talk a few days back about what it takes to reach top managerial schools!). Most important technical talks are videotaped and made available for employees to watch and learn, these talks vary in content from Google specific technologies to a host of open topics and technologies. There are tutorials available for almost all internal work flows(some of them could use improvement, but at least they are there).

Third, there are no rigid project specific boundaries, if someone finds that a technology they use has some bugs or could be done in a better way they are expected to do it themselves !!! And given the fact that most of us use Google products in a big way even before joining here there are a lot of interesting things to be done!!

Fourth, engineers can spend 20% of their time working on something that they care about. I am not to sure of this exactly but i think that people use this 20% time to do stuff identified in the Third point.

Fifth, and probably the most hyped are the Google perks!!
The snacks and food variety is simply path breaking, in break rooms you can find stuff from Mars bars, Snickers, Lays, Pringles (Yes in Bangalore) to fruits, dry fruits, 5-6 types of juices, milk (regular, skimmed, and a few other varieties), yogurt, cheese, butter, pasta, noodles, eggs, cookies, chikki, kurkure, sevral types of Cornflakes, Muesseli ( i don't even know what that is!), Coconut Water and several other goodies.
For snacks you have patties, pastries, samosas, CCD cakes, Subway Sub's and some other stuff.
Breakfast sometimes has Alu ka Parathas, sometimes idli-vadas, sometimes dosas's sometimes omelletes.
Dinner is also nice, one thing which i did not like much was the lunch! The food taste is not that great although the variety is still fairly diverse, with non veg 4 days a week, and ethnic cuisines once in a while!

Company transport during working days is almost like you have a chauffeur driven Indica at your beck and call!

The break room has a Foosball table and a giant sized synthesizer other than the tt and carrom, we do not have gym right now but we will be getting one pretty soon.

The HR and fincance seems to be stil finding its footing in India and One thing Google is not good at is compensation, earlier they over payed and in recovery mode right now they are not paying as much as some other companies like Microsoft and Adobe. However if the Stock keeps appreciating at the same rate as it has done in the past few months that should not be a problem!

Keep checking back, coming up next life in the Silicon Valley!