I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [131]
Marissa and I crossed each other's paths with increasing frequency that year. We'd spend weeks toiling in the product fields in perfect harmony, agreeing on significant projects like RealNames, and then some minor difference of opinion over a word here or there would turn into a flame war that singed every thatched roof in our communal village. Most of our disagreements sprang from a shared desire to do what was best for our users. Their satisfaction was our common deity, but we worshipped in different ways. Those disagreements began to take on more weight as Marissa's role expanded and it became harder to appeal her decisions—especially as she controlled the agenda and attendance list for Larry's product-review meetings, the logical place to hold such discussions. Increasingly, resolutions reached at our UI team meetings were undone at product review, where Marissa was now often the only team member present.
In the late spring of 2001, the UI team debated the color scheme for our expanding product line. Should Google groups be green or orange? What about image search? We sent around mockups to compare implementations. After weeks of discussion, Marissa took her own recommendation directly to product review. She handed down Larry's "final decision" after that meeting, while encouraging us to have a parallel discussion within the UI team.
"Doesn't a final decision negate any parallel discussions?" Karen asked. "I understand the urgency about making these decisions, but since Larry didn't have other pages for comparison, this may have been a rigged vote. We've spent hours on this in UI and it seems that the right thing to do would be to get consensus. Otherwise, why discuss it at all?" Coming from Karen, who always maintained a nonjudgmental tone, the indictment was particularly stinging.
Marissa responded that the timeline had been clear all along and that "forward motion" was needed to stay on track for the release the following week. Since we'd been talking about it for more than a month, it looked to her as if no consensus was reachable and she'd simply gone with what we had.
Marissa's desire to "fix things" as soon as they came to her attention was a common impulse among engineers, and Marissa was unquestionably productive. But where Urs had emphasized the need not to do tasks that fell below the priority line, Marissa's focus seemed diffuse. Every problem that came along required her immediate solution, even if it belonged in someone else's realm.
Bay Chang, who was also on the UI team, had done his doctoral dissertation on human-computer interactions (HCI). Yet he recognized that, at some point, creativity entered the equation. When we fell into overthinking a particular question, he bowed out gracefully. "I think maybe I should shut up," he said, "because I've been contributing too much to the design-by-committee on this page. We engineers should probably be involved with designing what components are necessary and how the technical parts of the page work and let the designers do the layout. It's a better division of labor."
I heard in that an endorsement for my own view that human judgment played a role, even in an atmosphere where every breath inhaled stats and exhaled analysis. Marissa tried to base every decision on data and data alone. That was hardly an unreasonable approach, and most Googlers would have supported it. Perhaps I just didn't trust the data I saw.
I had my own idiosyncrasies, of course—obstinacy and self-righteousness among them. The combination did not lead to quick or peaceful resolutions. The more often Marissa and I disagreed, the more I dug in my heels on matters of little consequence, like whether our porn filter screened "adult content" or "mature content."
The question of what to do about Chad was a bigger deal.
On August 1, 2001, I arrived at work to discover that our homepage sported a new feature.