Googled Read Online Free PDF

at full pay.
    Most employees are alloted a day a week, or 20 percent of their time, to work on projects they feel passionate about. This has produced more than a few of Google’s technological breakthroughs. Just as important, it conveys a sense of freedom. “It’s a way of assuring people that they are scientists and artists,” said Indian-born engineer Krishna Bharat, who used his 20 percent time to invent Google News. It’s also a way to encourage engineers to push the envelope, to assume that their mission is to disrupt traditional ways of doing things.
    There is at Google a utopian spirit not unlike that found at Burning Man, the annual anarchic-animistic retreat in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert that culminates in the burning in effigy of a giant wood and desert brush “man.” It does not go unnoticed by their friends that Brin and Page have been regular attendees at this weeklong retreat in August, whose Woodstock-like spirit is captured in Burning Man’s ten stated principles, which include a devotion “to acts of gift giving”; creating “social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising”; and “a radically participatory ethic” that can lead to “transformative change.” “Google is a cross between a start-up and graduate school,” said Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, who joined the company in 2001 and wears bright Hawaiian shirts and sneakers with laces left untied. “Formal rules don’t matter. There’s still a loose feel. The disadvantage of being a start-up is the fear that you will run out of money. There is stress. Google is more like graduate school in that you don’t have that stress. You expect one day that the guys in suits will take over. That hasn’t happened.” The engineers remain in charge. Google aims to be nonhierarchical. Stacy Savides Sullivan, who joined the company in December 1999 and said she was its fiftieth employee, is Google’s chief cultural officer. She described the culture as “flat,” and said her mission is to ensure that it stays that way. The reason the founders “smashed together” employees—making them share offices and work in teams on projects—is to “create a company everyone wants to work at,” to impose a team culture. She described her task this way: “My role is to help facilitate and orchestrate the culture.” It is no accident, many Googlers believe, that in 2007 and 2008 Fortune magazine christened Google the best U.S. company to work for.
    Google is both egalitarian and elitist. Salaries are modest, and there are no executive dining rooms. The two founders and CEO Schmidt (all now billionaires) have insisted on being paid $1 a year and have declined stock option grants since 2004; they were each paid bonuses of $1,700 in 2007 and declined bonuses altogether in 2008. The top salary of $450,000 was paid equally to the other members of the executive committee, who in most cases received bonues equal to 150 percent of their salary. Most employees are invited to share the riches. Google projected that stock option grants to employees in 2008 would total $1.1 billion. These grants confer millionaire status on many Googlers. Google’s approach to users is also egalitarian, from its reliance on “the wisdom of crowds” approach to search results to its demonstrated faith in “open source” systems.
    It is a close-knit culture. Google is not egalitarian about sharing information with outsiders. Ask just about any Googler basic questions—How many searches does Google perform each day? How many of its employees are non-Americans? What is the starting salary of engineers?—and you’ll receive a robotic, “We don’t disclose those numbers for competitive reasons.” Google has deliberately set out to build a team culture composed of elite performers, and an inevitable consequence is that it can be an opaque and insular culture.
    Google’s hiring practices are certainly