I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [99]
The feedback to our group was more ambiguous.
"Marketing should be less risk averse," Larry said.
"And more creative," Sergey added.
"And more productive," they concluded.
Cindy kept us informed when marketing's inability to make things happen was a topic for discussion at the executive level. It seemed to come up frequently.
"Don't let anything hold you up for eventual delivery," Cindy wrote in my six-month review. "Figure out the fastest way to get it done. And don't let your signature high standards slip!"
"Absolutely," I assured her. But without engineering support, some things just weren't going to happen, and support from engineering only came when a project was endorsed by Larry or Sergey. Negotiating personal relationships to gain their blessing added a complicating factor.
Google was a company that enforced closeness more than most, from overpopulated workspaces to shared meals to all-company ski trips to constant electronic accessibility twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We saw a lot of one another and often became good friends—but close quarters also drove people apart. Peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies became inescapable irritants. Privacy was hard to come by, and personal hygiene took on added importance. There were undercurrents of annoyance and avoidance and sometimes overt expressions of exasperation as the pressure to perform intensified. In the midst of all that, people fell in love and out of love, formed lifelong bonds and ended their marriages. For some, Google became more a lifestyle than an employer.
I liked coming to work. I liked my job. I liked the challenges. I liked the energy, and I liked my coworkers—with whom I was spending more hours than with my family. But for me the Googleplex was just a place to get things done. I was a forty-one-year-old man, married, with three kids, two cars, a cat, and a mortgage. I already had a home.
Chapter 12
Fun and Names
SERGEY SAT WITH Susan in the front of the aluminum canoe I was steering down the Russian River in Sonoma County. It was September 2000, and I was using all the navigational skills I had picked up at sleep-away camp to keep us clear of rocks and overhanging branches. Around us other Googlers fired super soakers and shouted gleefully when someone ran aground or capsized.
"paddle closer to Larry's canoe," Sergey urged me as he stripped off his shirt and positioned himself near the side. In an instant, he was out of the canoe and swimming toward his co-founder, grabbing for the gunwale of his boat—splashing and rocking it as if to tip it over—before heading off to attack one of the other engineers.
When we reached the last sandbar two hours later, Larry was waiting to take his revenge. While I pulled the canoe up onto the beach, he came running toward us through the shallow water.
"Hah," I thought. "Sergey's going down."
I was caught totally by surprise when Larry bypassed Sergey and tackled me instead, sending me sprawling into the water. I had never been subjected to a physical attack by a manager before. It was the kind of rambunctious roughhousing I associated with adolescent boys. I came out of the water smiling. The canoe trip was intended to forge closer ties among Googlers and to break us out of our crusty cubicle-enclosed lives. It was company-mandated fun, but it was fun.
I may have given the impression to this point that Google was a relentless pressure cooker in which we gave every ounce of sweat and passion to advance the greater good envisioned by our brilliant, demanding founders. That's pretty accurate. A very pregnant project manager—overcome by exhaustion—apologized to me for not answering an email I sent her after midnight. She shamefacedly admitted she had fallen asleep. However, Google was also a great place to