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"When we have statues," he warned, "then you should worry."

MISC Communications

Given their habit of abruptly cutting off debate, I was surprised at how much Larry and Sergey valued others' opinions. We had no shortage of those. Googlers shared their views willingly. Aggressively, even.

Call it "crowd-sourcing" or "illumination through alternative insights," asking what other Googlers thought was fundamental to the way Google worked. After all, Googlers had been poked, prodded, and sniffed before gaining a desk in the Plex, so anyone wearing a badge was clearly one of the clueful. It didn't matter if an idea came from someone fresh out of college or a veteran VP of engineering; it would stand or fall on its own merits rather than on the status of the person putting it forward. Even a lowly marketer could make suggestions and expect them to be considered.

"Larry and Sergey were up for honest intellectual debate," Salar told me, "and so they wanted to hear ideas. If you had a strongly felt view ... even if they didn't agree with it, they wanted to debate it."

Input from outside the Googleplex? That didn't carry the same cachet. As I saw with the April Fools' feedback, we discounted user dissatisfaction unless it could be clearly demonstrated to cause significant shifts in actual behavior. Our arrogance ultimately became a nasty undertone in conversations about Google taking place in the press and among those trying to do business with us, but I rarely saw it expressed by Googlers toward their own colleagues.

When Googlers did engage in blatant opinioneering, they did it on Googlers-MISC,* the Las Vegas of mailing lists, where nothing was out of bounds. On MISC, Googlers offered theories about proving P=NP and the best way to levitate frogs. They debated the brand of bottled water Charlie should stock in the micro-kitchens, a discussion encompassing total dissolved solids, bottle size, and the health benefits of naturally occurring uranium. After a week of this, Charlie's patience wore thin enough that he threatened to pull all the bottles and let the staff drink pond water.

I started a rancorous MISC thread by suggesting we eliminate the free donuts Ed Karrels delivered on Fridays in favor of fresh bagels. That one bounced around for years. A request with the subject line "Your mother doesn't work here," asking that Googlers do more to clean up after themselves, set off an explosion of self-righteous rage about the value of engineering time, the role of women in the postfeminist workplace, and the second floor's desperate, heartbreaking, and absolute need for more flatware. That lasted almost as long as the discussion about the corrupted physics in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

MISC was where I went to take the pulse of Google's culture, and by all signs, that culture was vibrant, diverse, and occasionally obsessive.

The Perpetual "Why?"

The mental image of engineers I carried into the Googleplex was one of introverted nerds with retarded social skills and skin that never experienced direct exposure to sunlight. I anticipated they would be easily cowed by strong personalities with loud voices and authoritative manners. Not that I would necessarily fall into that category, but after seven years working with acid-tongued inquisitorial journalists arguing points ad absurdum, I expected things at Google to be easier. I thought the most forceful pushback would come from the springs in my keyboard as I typed directives into my computer.

I discovered that the hardest-bitten investigative reporter is more easily appeased than the mellowest engineer riding a Prozac high. Engineers don't accept intuition, aren't swayed by emotion, refuse to surrender to rhetoric, and can't let anything imperfect pass by without comment. Engineers never stop asking "Why?" until they get an answer they consider demonstrably, provably, irrefutably true.

As Craig Silverstein explained it to me, "It's not an engineering personality to keep