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That expectation applied to everyone at Google. I was to identify key issues, then solve them or learn how to solve them. Saying "I can't do that, because I don't know how" revealed a deficiency of initiative, flexibility, and perhaps even IQ. It was a shock to my sense of the way an office operated. I'd worked mainly in union shops, where grievances were filed if you tried to do a task that "belonged" to someone else. I once flicked the wall switch in an empty TV studio and was scolded because studio lights could only be turned on by a member of NABET. When I worked at ad agencies, media buyers didn't write copy, copywriters didn't talk to clients, account people didn't buy TV time. It would have violated the natural order.

Matt Cutts, who carved out a niche attacking the porn and spam that degraded search results, summed up our staffing philosophy this way: "It works pretty well if you hire really smart people who are flexible and can get things done. Then just throw them into the deep end of the pool."

What you had studied in school wasn't relevant. What you had been doing at your previous job didn't matter. Once you waded into Google's sea of needs, someone tossed you a project and you were expected to grab it. Either you learned how to swim with it or it sank you.

It Goes without Saying

Even though Urs had an unhealthy fixation on hiring, he seemed like an upright guy who thought beyond the black and white of "Can we do it?" to the murkier question "Should we do it, just because we can?" I was impressed with the stand he took on RealNames, but I didn't realize that his fundamentalist views on absolute honesty had a dark side, one that seeped into the company culture and cast a shadow over working collaboratively.

"Urs was rather sparse with his praise," as systems guy Ben Smith diplomatically put it. Smith* wasn't much of a talker himself. Not aggressively reticent, just coolly laconic. A world-class Ultimate Frisbee player, Smith had the intensity of athletic confidence wrapped around an intellect capable of solving Google's most intransigent grit-in-the-gears software problems. Steve McQueen with a PhD, maybe.

"I had written up detailed instructions," Smith told me about a piece of notoriously unreliable software he had been up all night trying to fix. "I explained to Urs before I left, 'Here's what we've done. Here's how it's running. Here are the things to look at. Here's what's going to go wrong if it goes wrong, and here are ten steps you need to do to turn it off.' I was driving home, listening to Morning Edition, and I get a call from Urs. 'It broke like you said it would,' he says. 'I fixed it. Good work.' It was like, 'Your directions worked. Thank you for not completely screwing us over.'"

"Urs was people-challenged in just the funniest way," engineer Ron Dolin confirmed. "He didn't give compliments. If you were doing a good job, that's enough said. But some of us—especially the ones who were not the supermen of the company—could have used a little encouragement here or there."

So why was Urs so parsimonious with his accolades? Is it just that engineers are tight-lipped? "I don't think there's an engineering aversion to praise," Urs replied when I asked about our compliment-free culture. "It's one of my biggest management problems. Myself, I don't need effusive praise. I didn't grow up like that and it doesn't come naturally."

The language barrier contributed to Urs's reticence to laud his team. "'Good' in German really means 'good,'" he explained. "Here it means 'not really that good, but not bad yet.' In German, you wouldn't say 'excellent' almost ever. You'd say 'very good,' because the highest mark at school was 'very good.' That's the best there is. 'Excellent' maybe means Olympic caliber. Not what normal people would achieve. That was always a little bit of a challenge."

Urs not only had trouble giving compliments, he had a hard time accepting them as well. "My advisor at Stanford would tell me that things