I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [23]
Jeff described the stoichiometry of their partnership this way: "Sanjay and I balance each other pretty well, because he tends to be more reserved and analytical and I tend to say, 'Let's do something now. Let's get it done.' Put the two of us together and we go just the right speed."
Ben Gomes put it slightly differently as he explained to me why he was so comfortable working with Sanjay. Sanjay was very, very smart in a way that was systematic and therefore easy to follow, "whereas Jeff was just brilliant." Ben added, "I couldn't learn to be brilliant."
Engineering had speed and direction and was accelerating toward the goal of building a better Google. Those of us in marketing wanted a better Google, too, but we weren't as clear on how to get there.
"Technically, something either works or it doesn't," ops manager Jim Reese once acknowledged. "If our site is up, it's up. With marketing, there's more gray area." That gray area was bounded by a slippery slope, according to our founders, and at the bottom of that slope lay a cesspool of intellectual dishonesty. Over my first few weeks, the marketing group had to sort out priorities and roles, so it's not surprising that Larry and Sergey did not know exactly what we were doing. They gave a few clues to how they felt about marketing in general, though.
"It doesn't have to be true—it's marketing," Sergey joked about our corporate web pages.
"That's because marketing likes to lie," Larry let slip. He smiled when he said it, but I sensed we were being held to account for everything engineers hated about the nonquantifiable world, with its corrupted communications and frequent flyer programs. God help anyone who offered a marketing opinion as if it were a scientific fact.
As a result of Larry and Sergey's skepticism, we in marketing never attained the sense of purpose Urs brought to engineering. Cindy handled PR with surgical precision and Larry and Sergey trusted her judgment, but the founders wanted to wield marketing like a sledge instead of a scalpel. They'd tell her to "press release" things, by which they meant alert the media that we'd made changes no one but engineers would care about. Reporters didn't respond to whistles only dogs could hear. Cindy held off the founders and went about stitching together deeper, long-term relationships, so when we finally had something worthy of an announcement the press would pay attention.
Before a press release could go out, though, Larry insisted on running the draft past everyone in the building.
"I agreed to do it, with reservations," said Cindy. "I definitely never did this at any other company. I did not have that kind of relationship with engineers at Apple because we had layers of organization between marketing and the techies, and I don't think that's unusual. We lived in different buildings, different worlds. I was pleasantly surprised by the tone and quality of the feedback I got from Googlers."
Google was different that way. Even though engineers were kept separate according to the floor plan, email penetrated all corners of the company and communal meals and snack rooms led to plenty of cross-pollination. It was surprising to me, too, how articulate and interesting the techies turned out to be when you got to know them, though as you might expect, coders were sticklers for the rules of grammar.
"Split infinitive," Craig noted about some copy I had written.
"Shouldn't that be 'the' instead of 'a'?" Urs asked about a tagline.
"'This' and 'FAQs' don't agree in number," another engineer admonished me.
I never minded these grammatical suggestions and corrections, which kept me on my toes and made me conscious that someone was paying attention