Authors: Douglas Edwards
Sometimes that physical release took an intimate form behind closed doors with a willing partner.
We had a crash cot in a windowless nap room for those who had reached the edge of endurable fatigue and lurched beyond it. One afternoon a staffer peeked in and found two engineers on the bed, engaged in an act of noncomputational parallel processing. It was decided that the space—once sanitized—could be put to better use as an office. No punishments were administered, no stern policy reminders sent out. Those who might have cast stones couldn't find adequate purchase on the moral high ground, and so unofficial UI experimentation continued, just later at night and relocated to offices lit only by passion and the glow of multiple monitor screens. "Hormones were flying and not everyone remembered to lock their doors," recalls HR manager Heather Carnes.
Larry and Sergey encouraged everyone to channel their excess energy into roller hockey instead. Any employee who signed up was issued a free NHL jersey emblazoned with his or her name and Google's logo. Hockey provided yet another metric by which Googlers could be evaluated.
"There is no better way to get to know someone," George Salah, a regular participant, believed. "To have their true colors come out, play sports with them. You get to see how aggressive they are, if they're ruthless or not, if they're capable of giving a hundred and ten percent." As a result, no one held back when fighting the founders for the puck. In fact, the harder you played, the more respect you earned. It was not uncommon to see blood and bruises when the games ended.
I never strapped on skates and joined Google's Thursday parking-lot hockey game, but I wasn't immune to the competitive intensity driving the company. I found my outlet in the rowing machine shoehorned into a corner of the rec room that engineer Ray Sidney had cobbled together. I'd drop into the gym between meetings, sit on the sliding seat, strap my sandaled feet into the footrests, and breathe deeply. I'd reflect on the electronic cholesterol clogging my inbox, the uninvited additions to my work queue, or some viewpoint variance I'd had with a colleague. I'd grip the padded pull bar, close my eyes, and jerk with all my might, sending my stationary craft slicing outward to placid waters far from the source of my current distress.
It wasn't approved form, but I wasn't trying to win a regatta. My goal was to generate the maximum number of ergs in the minimum amount of time, to best the score posted on the "Google Rowing Club" whiteboard resting against the wall. Claiming the title "best" in any category at Google took on added significance given the capabilities of those with whom we worked.
At age forty-one, I had much to prove. Sometimes it took me a little while to parse a TLA everyone else seemed to know.
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I voiced objections based on "irrelevant" experience gained over a twenty-year career. I drove a station wagon that smelled like baby wipes and spit-up. I didn't want the unripened grads with whom I shared the locker room to assume I was slowing down physically or mentally.
One afternoon the receptionist called me.
"Doug, can you come downstairs? Sergey asked if you could load his scuba gear in the car. He said you're the strongest guy here."
"Sure," I replied. Halfway to the lobby, I slowed down. Then I stopped. The founder of the company wanted me to do his scutwork. That couldn't be good, could it? But Sergey felt I was uniquely qualified. That was a plus, right? I was glad to be singled out, but embarrassed about the reason for it. Was I that in need of recognition?
Google's obsession with metrics was forcing me to take stock of my own capabilities. What did I bring to the table? What were my limits? How did I compare? Insecurity was a game all Googlers could play, especially about intellectual inferiority. Everyone but a handful felt they were bringing down the curve. I began to realize how closely self-doubt was linked to ambition and how adeptly Google leveraged the latter to inflate the former—urging us to pull ever harder to advance not just ourselves but the company as a whole.
Toward the end of my Google run, a newly hired senior manager put into words what I had discovered long before. "Let's face it, Doug," he confided, "Google hires really bright, insecure people and then applies sufficient pressure that no matter how hard they work, they're never able to consider themselves successful. Look at all the kids in my group who work absurd hours and still feel they're not keeping up with everyone else."
I had to agree that fear of inadequacy was a useful lever for prying the last erg of productivity out of dedicated employees. Everyone wanted to prove they belonged among the elite club of Google contributors. The manager who articulated that theory, though, considered himself too secure to play that game. Which may be why he lasted less than a year at Google.
Google's embrace of "organized chaos" extended to our workspace, which might charitably have been called a mess, or less charitably, a pigsty.
The locker room had come with showers and saunas. The odor we added ourselves: a pungent mix of soiled jerseys, scuffed knee pads, muddy pucks and headless hockey sticks, grip tape adhesive, deodorant dispensers, ripped underwear, and expired aftershave. Google soon provided towel service and installed low-energy Swedish washing machines that took a week to spin through a single cycle—introducing a ripe finishing note of undone laundry, abandoned athletic socks, and mildewed terry cloth. Imagine a geek fraternity claiming squatters' rights in an insurance office.
The one area in which hygiene was fastidiously maintained was engineering. Not the engineers' physical space—they were apparently all feral children—but their operating principles.
Urs insisted on adopting the best practices he had seen in more industrial settings to things like source control and compiler warnings. "We'd make sure the compiler actually failed if it had a warning, so you couldn't ignore it," he told me. He formalized the most important elements into a style guide, which became a mandate enforced by Craig Silverstein.
"I had no desire for a style guide," Craig noted, "but Urs was really insistent."
The biggest question was which programming language to use. Craig wanted to use C. Urs preferred C++. Urs prevailed, but he agreed to restrict Google coders "from using the bad parts of C++."
"What are the bad parts of C++?" I once asked Craig.
"Most of it," he said with a straight face.
Craig believed Google would need an integrating force to prevent redundant or conflicting efforts, maintain standards, help set priorities, and provide feedback during performance reviews. He made it his goal to be that force, to be "the one who knew what was going on everywhere."
"Until we were about a hundred people," he recalls, "I'd go around and talk to everyone. I'd say, 'How's your work going? Do you need any help?' Some people got really upset about that. 'This guy keeps bothering me. What's he doing?' Urs had to take me aside and tell me to stop." Craig realized that "they didn't need someone to pay that close attention. Everyone was still just one degree away. They knew who to talk to. There was very good communication."
The one thing that did need a high level of attention was the code itself. To look for potential problems, Craig started scanning every automatic alert generated whenever someone checked in a codebase change—no matter how minor. But a lone proofreader couldn't keep up with the growth of engineering's output. So Urs instituted a formal code-review process.
"You get to pick one good engineering practice to be your cultural touchstone," Craig said, "and for us it was code reviews." To initiate a review, a coder would send out a pointer to an online design document. Anyone could respond with comments, but an official reviewer had to sign off on the actual code.
The benefit was obvious. "Finding problems in the beginning," engineer Ron Dolin explained, "was a hundred times more efficient than finding them later on."
Still, as Google grew, not all the programmers subscribed to the idea that their code needed proofing or that it was their responsibility to look over other people's work. As Craig explained it, "We put a process in place to prevent submitting code without review, unless you lied."
To get around the process, people would perform cursory reviews. "I'd send out a big, giant piece of code," Craig said, "and they'd send back, 'Looks good.' I suspect there's more that could have been said about that code."
When new employees started, Craig reviewed their code himself, inculcating them into the system of collaborative authoring. Some people hated it. "paul Bucheit hated it," recalls Craig. "Noam
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hated it. But Paul ended up doing a lot of code reviews on his own and being really supportive of that methodology. Noam thought it was a waste of time—he's like Larry and Sergey, a research developer. He'd say, 'I'm spending more time reviewing this code than I spent writing it—how is that a good use of anyone's time?'"
Sanjay Ghemawat did not hate code reviews. Though he had come out of a research lab where looking over others' shoulders was considered intrusive, if not inappropriate, he immediately saw the value of input from an intelligent reviewer. The code reviews enforced cross-pollination of ideas while elevating standards for what was acceptable. "At one extreme," Sanjay recognized, "you could say, 'Okay, just make sure it obeys the style guide,' which was pretty mechanical. My take was different. You needed to see if you could convince yourself that it was actually going to work, that it didn't have corner cases or problems—that it would be easy to understand. I think it worked out really well."
Ben Gomes praised Sanjay's code and his systematic approach to growing the code base: "It set a tone for the rest of the code that was written." But he joked that Sanjay maintained unreasonable standards.
"He couldn't stand the fact that I didn't use white space properly. At a code review, he'd put his cursor below the end of everything and say, 'There's white space there. Why is there white space there?'"
Sanjay laughed when I asked him about that.
"I just did it a little bit to wind Ben up. I wanted to be able to come back to it in a couple of years, having basically forgotten everything we were thinking about when we wrote it, and still understand it. If all this bad formatting is getting in the way, it's something to fix."
Because Urs promoted team engineering to break complex problems into solvable pieces, code reviews were essential to ensure the pieces would fit together when reassembled. The system gave engineers independence but kept them from wandering too far from the standards unifying the codebase.
"A good team is ultimately what makes or breaks the problem," Urs explained years later. "If the team isn't the right one, they make little mistakes that erode the solution and in the end, you don't know what mistake you made, but it doesn't work. You need the control every day, every week. A new person will make little tiny judgment calls and not realize the cumulative effect. So after a few months you have actually destroyed the idea while you made no recognizable mistake. It was a sequence of small things."
Engineering had its discipline and routines—I had mine.
I began arriving earlier. Much earlier.
I'd tiptoe out of the house before six, start my car, and pull out of the driveway without turning on the headlights. Our bedroom faced the street, our blinds were broken, and Kristen was not a morning person. When I hit Highway 85, I'd crank up the heat and the radio and roll down the windows. By the time I arrived at the darkened Googleplex I was fully awake. I'd pull into the spot closest to the door and turn on my brights to see if the neighborhood skunk had camped out on the front steps. My first run-in with him had scared the crap out of me. I'd turn on the office lights and the copy machines before heading to the locker room.
Google's building stood adjacent to a wetlands preserve on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. Jogging trails lined with white, yellow, purple, and pink wildflowers stretched for miles north and south, from the blimp hangars at Moffett Field along a jetty and over small hillocks to the Palo Alto airport. Hawks floated overhead and herons waded through the ponds. Raccoons, rabbits, and wildlife-watching retirees shared the dirt paths with swarms of gnats and a powerful ebb-tide aroma. I'd stretch against the front steps, start my DiscMan, and trudge slowly across the asphalt toward the Bay.
By eight a.m., I could run a couple of miles, have a sauna, shower, read the paper, eat a bowl of cereal, and still be practically alone in the building as I began cleaning out the barnacles that had attached themselves to my inbox overnight. Having unscrewed the fluorescent bulbs above my desk, I used the warmer glow of my desk lamp for illumination until the sun was high enough to come tripping through the windows. I'd plug in my headphones; crank up my homegrown hash of Yo Yo Ma, Otis Spann, and Ozomatli; and begin banging keys in a state of complete Zen-like absorption.
It felt good to be alive.
The euphoria usually passed by ten o'clock, when the drip of incoming email turned into a raging torrent and the daily meetings began. I shuffled from talks about new search features to UI discussions to product-roadmap updates. Google's clock ran on tech-company hours, which began no earlier than ten a.m. and ended when the following dawn poked the engineers in the eyes with rosy red fingers. At seven or eight in the evening, I drove home to tuck the kids into bed before logging in remotely to write copy and put out any fires that had started in the hour I'd been offline.