I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [51]
"Once I ate an extra nine pork chops," Chad recalled with a happy smile. "Another time Charlie gave me a mixing bowl full of ice cream, whipped cream, nuts, candy, and chocolate sauce. It must have weighed a couple pounds. That was insane."
Great food also had the ability to attract great talent.
"I don't know what to do," senior engineer Luiz Barroso moaned to Jeff Dean the night he had to decide whether to join VMWare or Google. "I've made these lists. I've assigned points to all the pros and cons, and it's tied at 112 to 112."
Jeff knew that the day of Luiz's interview at Google, Charlie had served crème brûlée for lunch. "Did you factor in the crème brûlée?" he asked. "Because I know you really like crème brûlée."
"Oh no! I didn't consider that," Luiz admitted. The next morning he accepted Google's offer.
It wasn't just a nice gesture to treat job candidates to a decent meal, it was part necessity and part test of temperament. Since interviews stretched into daylong affairs, it was important to give applicants enough nutrition to sustain them. We could easily spot the aspirants—they'd be sitting out on the deck sweating in navy blue suits while all around them Googlers in shorts and sandals chatted and chewed. Any Googler who happened to be within earshot could pepper candidates with questions, and the answers could influence a hiring decision as much as anything in the formal interview process. Giving off a "Googley" vibe mattered.
I never knew whom I might bump into while waiting for a fresh platter of polenta to be put out. At first, celebrity drop-ins tended to be tech luminaries like pundit Esther Dyson, Sun superstar Kim Polese, or the chairman of Intel, but as Google's fame grew, you were just as likely to run into Nobel laureates and internationally known politicians, people like Muhammad Yunus, Queen Noor, Bill Clinton, or Jimmy Carter, pushing trays along the aluminum rails under Charlie's watchful eye as the Grateful Dead wailed from wall-mounted speakers. Journalists from Japan and France stood in the middle of the café pointing cameras and murmuring in their native tongues as print reporters from Time and Fortune and BusinessWeek huddled with Larry or Sergey to chew on chicken sandwiches and ruminate on the future of search. The café took on a circus quality and lost some of the intimacy of the first few months. But the food always brought me back.
Blending equal parts fanaticism, ego, and artistic temperament, Charlie served up a mélange of exotic tastes mixed with intelligent discourse and the fellowship of shared interests. He was a blur in the kitchen, throwing inadequate resources at impossible demands, with sweat beading his brow and food stains augmenting the all-over tie-dye of his custom-made apron. The lesson of the data center applied to the kitchen as well: cheap production units pushed to their limits offered superior performance. Individual servers, whether of web pages or of steamed broccoli, might give out, but the system wasn't truly broken as long as it kept delivering results. To their undying credit, Charlie, Jim, and the rest of the Google kitchen crew never experienced a catastrophic failure. Day after day after day, they fed us—their infrastructure running on elbow grease, ingenuity, and heart. It was a very Googley way to be.
Chapter 8
Cheap Bastards Who Can't Take a Joke
HOW MANY GOOGLERS does it take to screw in a light bulb?" Sergey asked the UI team in late February 2000. His complaint was about browser buttons—a trivial bit of code that allowed users to add Google search links to their web-surfing software. We were debating names and design details by email, and the list of people involved had grown to ten, including Urs and Cindy. Sergey found that ridiculous.
"If we continue to do all of our work at this kind of pace," he observed,