When I was younger, I would have considered the Google environment to be perfect. A utopia for software engineers - especially if you have to be in the suburbs like Mountain View. The size would never have worked for me, but seeing something similar implemented at a startup level would have been my dream.
Now on my fourth startup, I feel it's unhealthy for the employees and the company. Having everyone's life revolve around a corporate culture is stifling. Employees lose perspective and balance. They lose touch with people who are not like them. Monoculture develops; groupthink flourishes.
It is a dangerous thing to be completely dependent on a company for basic necessities or for your friends. It makes it hard to leave everything you knew behind. It makes people defensive when any criticism of the company is raised since it attacks their way of life.
While a comfortable work environment is important, I reject the idea that employees should be encouraged, even passively, to stay at work all the time. I think employees should have a life outside of work involving people who aren't at the company and don't work in tech.
>They lose touch with people who are not like them. Monoculture develops; groupthink flourishes.
This is, I think, Google's biggest weakness. All the people I know at google think that google is a good company that has good intentions; not just that google is a good company to work for, but that google, an advertising company, makes the world a better place.
This leads to things like the google buzz problem. People at google genuinely don't see how the rest of us might assign less than honourable motives to Google's actions.
Every other company I know has a bunch of people (especially technical people) that may disagree with or take a cynical view of the company as a whole, employees that stick around because the work is interesting or the pay is good or what have you.
But that's the thing; everyone I know at google genuinely seems to love google. The two people I know that didn't, well, they quickly left. (Incidentally, both of those people were female. My impression, and I emphasise that I'm an outsider and that my impression may not reflect reality, is that google takes technical women less seriously than other valley tech companies.)
Part of this is that google tends to hire from the top 50%, and the top 50% have more options, and thus they are more likely to switch jobs to find a company they really like.
I believe it's more than that, though; I know plenty of people good enough to be google that have positions they like in companies that they don't like. Go look at any of the local defence contractors, and you will find plenty of people that are up to the google standard, doing interesting work for an end-goal that many of them find repugnant.
I do indeed. Not unhealthy in the sense of danger to people's bodies, but certainly I think it can easily stunt personal development and in the long run, harm the company by creating an insular monoculture.
A company can only succeed long-term if it understands its customers. Google, if it continues down this path, will only understand Google.
Even if I could make it past the interview stage, I would never want to work at Google.
No matter how nice the work environment is it still feels like they are prettying up a cage. They make it feel like you can come and go and blur the line between life and work..but you are still just an employee. You can't build a company on the side while working at Google (without their blessing or cut) and you are still told what to do.
Google also owns on all software their employees produce on their own time. That type of cult mentality would be the most troubling thing for me to deal with.
Not precisely. They're bound by the same California (or whatever the local jurisdiction) laws that everyone else is. The laws state that the employer has no claim to any IP developed by the employee "on their own time, without use of company resources, and not along the lines of business of the company".
The problem is that third clause - since Google operates in so many businesses, there is a potential conflict of interest with virtually anything you might want to do. Google's policy is no different from any other employer's. It's just that if you work at a financial software company and want to develop a social network, you are not competing with your employer. If you work at Facebook and want to develop a trading platform, you are not competing with your employer (yet; who knows what they got planned?). If you work at Google and try to develop either of those, you are competing with official Google products (Google+ and Google Finance, respectively).
There's a procedure in place to clarify whether any IP developed on your own time conflicts with current or present lines of Google's business. I don't know the exact numbers, but IIRC they release about 70% of proposals back to their owners. You can, of course, just take your chances and develop the software anyway; lack of an official release does not mean Google owns your software, it just means Google might own your software, and that's up to a court of law to decide. But who wants to fight Google's legal department? And most VCs or acquirers won't go near you if there's any legal uncertainty surrounding your startup.
Now on my fourth startup, I feel it's unhealthy for the employees and the company. Having everyone's life revolve around a corporate culture is stifling. Employees lose perspective and balance. They lose touch with people who are not like them. Monoculture develops; groupthink flourishes.
It is a dangerous thing to be completely dependent on a company for basic necessities or for your friends. It makes it hard to leave everything you knew behind. It makes people defensive when any criticism of the company is raised since it attacks their way of life.
While a comfortable work environment is important, I reject the idea that employees should be encouraged, even passively, to stay at work all the time. I think employees should have a life outside of work involving people who aren't at the company and don't work in tech.