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"Google engineers were so strong-willed," agreed Matt Cutts, "that sometimes if we thought that Larry and Sergey were wrong, we just ignored them."

Many Google employees lacked nonacademic work experience. They had never tasted the lash of a manager's reproach or the sting of a colleague's rebuke, so their impulse to jump over fences and spread the wild oats of their wisdom remained unneutered.

"They would fight over everything," according to HR manager Heather Cairns, who often dealt with their issues related to job benefits. "'Why should I sign this? I'm not gonna sign it.' They challenged the most mundane things—minutiae—even though it was a benefit for them."

Project manager Deb Kelly, who got a steady stream of unsolicited feedback, wondered about those who offered advice, "Why are you weighing in? I'm not even sure I've met you yet."

This state of perpetual "Why?" occasionally annoyed even other engineers. Hardware designer Will Whitted found the ever-inquisitive commentariat a pain: "It may have been powerfully important in getting Google to work, but it pissed me off a lot. Because they were really, really bright and had been successful in one thing, they thought they automatically knew everything else. So they could tell me how to do thermal design and they could tell me what size screws to use. They honestly thought it would make things right or they thought the thing I was doing was incorrect and would make things bad."

Emerging unscathed from this idea melee required access to information about the company's inner workings. At first this information floated freely, permeating Google like radio waves. You just had to know what frequencies to tune in to. I took to poring over engineering's weekly snippets and diving deep into MOMA, our intranet. I paid attention at TGIF and eavesdropped on tablemates at lunch. No one consciously tried to limit data flow, but we lacked a formal clearinghouse for updates on company initiatives.

Larry's product-review meetings created a central information nexus. I could sit on the black couch, plug directly into Larry's head, and get root-level access to all that I needed to know. Nothing helped me do my job better than downloading directly from Google's wellspring of strategic direction. Cool draughts of clear vision washed away ambiguity about user interfaces, product features, and competitive positioning. I basked in my unobstructed view of the deliberations driving our company's creation, blissfully unaware that I would soon be banished from this information Eden and forced to forage for the info bits that I had come to rely upon to do my job.

Yes, I'm Saying No

With everyone expressing opinions about everything, I had to speak louder and more insistently lest my voice be lost in the din. Apparently other people felt the same way. We held robust dialogues.

When I needed to advance an argument, whether about the name for a new product or the wording of a promotional line on the homepage, I began by building alliances. I put Salar near the top of my list of draft picks, because he and others who had joined Google before the move to Mountain View* held sway in the decision-making process. Any of us could talk to the founders and have our opinions considered, but their voices were the first to be sought and the loudest to be heard. When one of this inner circle diametrically opposed my position, earning the counterbalancing support of another became essential.

Most flare-ups quickly damped to a simmer, the heat dissipated through flames on topic-specific email lists, the private clubs where Googlers could assemble to gnaw their own intestines. Particularly hot issues, however, might engulf the full Googlers list, which went to every inbox in the company.

"Engineers are argumentative," Urs acknowledged. "You don't want to stop it, but it shouldn't get in the way. At some point we made Googlers a moderated list,† just because people weren't thinking that their messages