I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [53]
And when Larry was done, he was done. "I don't want to talk about this anymore. It's not worth discussing. Just do it."
Larry (Sergey, too) ended discussions abruptly when he saw time being wasted on something he had already decided. He hated rehashing arguments and bringing irrelevant people up to speed. Mostly, he couldn't abide having to explain the obvious. Sometimes all it took was a look. Project manager Deb Kelly proposed a new method for putting content online and ran it by Larry. "He did the eyebrow thing," she later recalled, arching one eyebrow like Spock. "And he didn't even give me a reason. He was just basically—'No.' It was clear that it was a stupid idea."
It didn't take long for me to have my own first brush with Larry's debate-killing decisiveness. Larry wanted to relabel the "cache" link on our results pages to read "show matches."* Clicking the link would still take users to a cached version of the page, but it would now highlight words on that page matching the user's query. I found the name change confusing and felt sure our users would too. It was a wording issue. That was my domain. I voiced my objections at the UI meeting and won agreement that we wouldn't make the change without at least testing it first.
The next morning I woke to find "show matches" had replaced "cache" on all our results pages.
"The UI team does not have control over these decisions," Bay Chang reminded me when I asked what had happened. "Larry wanted 'show matches.'" Larry had stopped Marissa as she headed home, and together they had decided to implement the edit.
"I carefully considered all the feedback," Larry said when I confronted him. "And I don't want this to be discussed endlessly. There are a lot of more important things for us to do. We've already repeated all the arguments, which means it's time for a decision."
I had thought that decision time had passed during our UI team meeting.
"Why did Google stop showing cached pages?" asked the first user complaint we received.
"I loved the cached pages! Why are they gone?" demanded a dozen others. It wasn't the End of Days, but given how few people actually used the feature, it qualified as a minor plague. Most alarming, reporters complained to Cindy and passed along notes they were getting from their readers. A week later we changed the label back to "cached" and I plotted three new data points on my Google graph:
Nothing was final until Larry said it was.
Larry communicated directly to the people who could implement his decisions.
Larry erased what he had etched in stone if the walls crumbled around him.
The third point was the most important lesson to me, because undoing things done wrong would be the crux of my own Jericho moments at Google.
The first of those moments started as a joke.
Are You Kidding Me?
It was the middle of March. Time to put away the space heater and break out the cargo shorts and sandals. April was right around the corner. My first April at Google. My first April first. My first opportunity to undertake the torqued brain aerobics and flop-sweat composition that I came to know as the Google April Fools' joke.
April Fools' Day would become a perennial black hole in my calendar, a gravity well into which my attention would be sucked from increasingly great distances in time. Sergey, on the other hand, loved April Fools'. His sense of humor didn't stop at the boundaries of good taste, and when it came to April Fools', he dynamited decorum and put moderation to the torch. The cruelest month, indeed.
I was headed into Charlie's Café when I ran into Sergey. The day was warm and my mood was full of springtime. Charlie had made my favorite apple galette for dessert. As I pushed my tray through the line I chatted with Sergey