Day 12 - Google

Today we had the opportunity to tour the facilities of the internet giant that is Google and it definitely held up to expectations.  Before going to the Google-plex I envisioned a place full of food, slides, toys, and anything you would ever need to actually live on the campus if you needed, and that is exactly what we saw.  The perks given to Google employees were seemingly endless.  Free laptops, employee discounts at stores such as Apple, free (amazing and delicious) food, free travel and expenses for work, long maternity and paternity leave period, and electric cars that employees can check out were among countless other perks.  In fact there were so many perks for employees that our host, tour guide, and former Luther grad Charles who works in the equivalent of Googles internal technology help desk told us that there is a site for employees to keep track of all the perks that they receive.  At first glance it seemed like Google was supplying so many amenities to its employees either because it could or in order to attract talent.  While the latter is true it is more of a necessity than I originally thought in that a large number of tech companies here on the west coast provide a similar amount and diversity of benefits as Google does.  So, in order to compete, Google is almost forced to provide the perks that it does.  Another reason for the plethora of benefits that I learned about was that it allows employees to practically live on the campus.  If you can get unlimited food, transportation, haircuts, nap rooms, sports, laundry, work out facilities, and practically anything else you may need, why would you ever leave the work place?  In fact, when we asked Charles if this was actually plausible to essentially live at the Google-plex, he said that he only went back to his apartment to sleep at night and in the morning he came right to Google for breakfast than work.  In this sense, Google has done a great job of melding people’s home lives into work.

One thing that surprised me about Google was how they seemed to be at the cutting edge of technology rather than following it.  Now granted big companies have more money to fund new and exciting and possibly not profitable projects, we had both seen and heard that bigger companies are less likely to use new and less proven technologies such as the Go programming language or WebRTC as they are risky to institute and use in consumer products.  However after talking with employees at Google, they denied this saying that they are in fact encouraged to use these new and blossoming technologies to help spur creativity and production.  Along these same lines, employees are encouraged to take what they call 10% time, or 10% of their paid working hours to work on a personal (or cross-functional) project.  This once again shows how, contrary to my prior belief, Google really does value creativity and pushing boundaries in order to keep its competitive edge.