Authors: Douglas Edwards
It's true that male-skewed tech companies sometimes devolved into frat-boy funhouses, and I never doubted Larry and Sergey's commitment to hiring technically adept women. However, I often wondered whether the ideal of a "healthier work environment" wasn't driven by our founders' own deeper need to lead lives that contained more than code. At the
Mercury News
we had once run an ad in which we assured readers: "In some parts of the world, the language of love is not Java." Google was not one of those places. Hiring more women would not only forestall a Neanderthal culture, it would increase the odds of socialization and ultimately continuation of the species. Given that Larry and Sergey more or less lived at the office, it hardly surprised anyone that each of them dated members of the staff. It would have been more of a shock if they had actually met women they deemed acceptably intelligent and not recruited them to Google just so they could see them on occasion.
Whatever the rationale, I discovered that the emphasis on gender equality was real.
"Why don't we have Google t-shirts for women?" Sergey demanded of me after a female visitor left the office with our standard extra-large men's t-shirt. He was as upset as I'd ever seen him. When a woman in France chastised him about American companies and their enormously oversized t-shirts that no French woman would wear, he insisted we address the problem once and for all. I ordered women's shirts—more than I thought we could ever give away—but we couldn't keep them in stock. I didn't understand why they were so popular, given our limited female staff, until my cousin thanked me for the one I had sent her and added, "They're quite see-through. Was that intentional?"
I saw Eric often in his first weeks. He seemed to spend much of his time roaming the halls with a bemused look on his face, as if he couldn't believe he'd actually joined this company populated with big rubber balls and lava lamps and scruffy animals sleeping on couches—sometimes with the pets they had brought to work lying next to them.
Usually when I saw Eric he had company. One day it was Governor Howard Dean. More than once it was Al Gore. Gore apparently had plenty of free time on his hands. I ran into him everywhere.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Vice President," I said to the tall man standing at the urinal next to me as I took a break between meetings. That experience pretty much dissipated any residual sense of awe.
When Eric and Al stood outside my office chatting about Gore's interest in creating a new independent TV network, I ever so gently nudged the door closed with my foot. I had work to do.
I wasn't sure about Eric. No one seemed to know what he was doing, since Larry and Sergey were still making all the decisions. Other than the purchase-order edict, we didn't hear much from him for a while, perhaps because he didn't officially add the title CEO until August 2001.
Eric did add transparency to the decision-making process, forcing discussions in public meetings so everyone could see the sausage being made, even if we didn't always like the ingredients stuffed into it.
"In a culture which is consensus driven," Eric explained to reporter Fred Vogelstein in November 2005, "the trick is to have everybody participating in the decision and make sure everybody has been heard."
*
That wasn't true at Google before Eric came onboard. As one drifting into a more distant orbit around the stars of our universe, I appreciated Eric's efforts to shed light on a process that all too often took everything in and let nothing out. That support for transparency led me to view him as an ally, a friend of marketing, and a voice of reason.
A month before Eric could implement his ideas as CEO, Google's top-down decision-making reached its peak—and its nadir. Larry decided that July to reorganize the engineering group. It didn't go well. Our founders cut bureaucracy the way they cut costs—with a cleaver instead of a paring knife.
Larry trusted his newly minted product managers (PMs), Salar and Susan, and the two new hires, John "J.P." Piscitello and Pearl Renaker, who joined them in April 2001. They all reported directly to him. He was less happy about the half-dozen project managers who had been working with engineering for months. Project managers created timelines, allocated resources, and prodded engineers to ensure products shipped on schedule. They conducted performance reviews and kept people like me from bugging the technical staff with requests that might slow things down. They also acted as a buffer between the engineers and the executives, or as systems engineer Ben Smith described it, "shielded their employees from random shit that came from above." In a company like Google, standing between the founders and the engineers did not earn you a sash and a spot on the homecoming float.
I liked the project managers. More important, I needed them. They were our contacts for any task requiring technical resources, such as evaluating vendors or tracking the performance of our banner ads. The project managers assigned engineers to work with us—engineers who were under great pressure and would not normally consider a marketing task important enough to add to their to-do lists.
Wayne Rosing joined Google in late 2000, and in January 2001 took over as VP of engineering, replacing Urs Hölzle, who, as the first Google Fellow, went off to solve large-scale operations issues caused by our rapid growth (things like energy consumption and efficiency across hosting centers). Wayne had an avuncular manner and a Charlie Brownish appearance that he subverted by occasionally sporting a diamond-stud earring or dying his hair bright red. He brought with him decades of experience in running engineering groups, including Sun Microsystems Laboratories, which he had founded. Wayne discovered that Google engineers largely controlled their own destinies, sometimes acting on—and sometimes ignoring—priorities that flowed from Larry and Sergey in an ever-shifting spectrum of urgency.
The company grapevine soon grew heavy with rumors that big organizational changes were coming, fermenting the staff, who whispered nervously about layoffs and what that would signify at a company not yet out of its infancy. Still, when Wayne called an all-engineering meeting in July 2001 and announced a reorganization, most of the engineers were caught by surprise. So were the project managers, who learned in public that their jobs no longer existed.
When the announcement was made, there was audible grumbling among the assembled engineers. They generally respected the project managers and felt they had a real role to play. And they objected to the idea of anyone's dismissal by public firing squad.
To stave off open revolt, Larry stood at the front of the room and laid out all the things he wasn't happy about in the engineering management system, starting with the idea that non-engineers were supervising those who knew more about the technology than they did. The remarks stung the project managers, some of whom felt it was a personal repudiation, especially since Larry had not raised the issues with them individually in advance of the meeting.
"It sucked," one of the project managers told me later. "I felt humiliated by it. Larry said in front of the company that we didn't need managers, and he talked about what he didn't like about us. He said things that hurt a lot of people."
The grumbling got much louder. "I yelled at Larry," engineer Ron Dolin admitted, "because he said that the managers they were planning to lay off weren't doing a good job. And I said that this was no place to give a performance evaluation. Laying these people off was completely ridiculous, and the nature of the announcement was totally unprofessional."
"I did my best to advise that there is true value in management," Stacy Sullivan recalls, "and you can set a tone by how you manage this. And Eric said, 'Let them try this.' Wayne said, 'Let them try it, it's their company.' It bothered me. We tried to give input—me, Omid, Urs. But in the end, hopefully it was a lesson learned for Larry and Sergey."
The solution that Larry wanted was to have all the engineers report directly to Wayne. While it was positioned as a way of streamlining the engineering structure, most of those I talked with thought it was really about Larry's priorities not being addressed.
"Larry and Sergey had certain things they wanted worked on," Gmail creator Paul Bucheit explained, "and there were these standing groups that were making up their own things and not doing whatever it was Larry and Sergey wanted." For example, Larry wanted to scan books. Many, many books. Every book in the Library of Congress. But no one seemed interested in undertaking such a wildly ambitious project. With the engineers operating as autonomous units under the protection of their project managers, Larry found himself increasingly frustrated.
Howard Gobioff was convinced that "this was about people getting between Larry and Sergey and the engineers. At a time when the organization was small enough that the founders still wanted to be very hands on. It was very badly handled. Most of the engineers were pissed because we liked our managers. They were non-technical, so they lacked delusions that they knew better than we did."
Urs, characteristically, blamed himself. "What caused it was my inexperience at managing," he told me, "and Larry being very good at recognizing the long-term conflict that created." Urs had believed his engineers would cover Google's coding needs, so he probed potential project managers for organizational ability and tested their people skills instead of their technical knowledge.
"So ... what I underestimated," he went on, "is that managers always make judgment calls. They have to in order to function. If you're in a highly technical area, you can't make good judgment calls if you're not highly technical yourself. We changed at that point our strategy for hiring managers—away from coordination to saying that what matters most is technical leadership."
Larry recognized the problem sooner than Urs did, but neither had the experience to make the transition graceful and painless. Instead, Larry just did what came naturally. The system didn't work, so he rebooted it.
"I can't think of anything that people at Google were ever so upset about—at least in engineering," Paul Bucheit recalled years later. "people had some sense of ownership of the company, that it was this big happy family. And all of a sudden, some of your friends were kicked off the island. You're like, 'This isn't what I thought it was. I thought we were all in it together, and we just decided to get rid of these people.'"
At most companies, the notion of an engineering head having hundreds of direct reports would be ludicrous, but because he believed Google engineers were self-directed, Wayne just did away with the management layer between him and them. He divided the engineers into teams of three, with each team having a technical lead who was an engineer, not someone hired to manage.
The catch was that each team would also have a manager assigned from Larry's new product organization. It was a not-so-subtle introduction of a true product-management system. The project managers who had covered the engineers' backs had been replaced by Larry's trusted lieutenants, who would be looking over their shoulders.
"You could do a lot of stuff with tech leads," search quality expert Ben Gomes explained to me, "because of the people we hired. Anywhere else, having three or four hundred people report to one person would have been insane. Yet it worked reasonably well—for a while. And then at some point it didn't work."
Ultimately, the project managers were spared. Urs absorbed most of them into his operations area. But the angst unleashed by the reorg did not fade quickly.
When the dust settled, all hundred and thirty engineers reported directly to Wayne. The bureaucracy was dead. There was no hierarchy. There were no in-depth performance reviews. Engineers were on their own, independent entities, connected only to the other members of their teams and tenuously tethered by PMs to the central organization. Their direct interaction with Larry happened mainly at product review. Wayne took to holding weekly meetings and to walking through the cube farms on a regular basis to ensure that he had face time with individual engineers and that they were able to approach him with issues that concerned them.
It was an engineer's dream come true or a bit of a nightmare, depending on whom you asked. No clueless pointy-haired boss could get in the way and screw things up, but there were no clear signals from above about what was important and what was urgent and what was both. Groups struggled for resources and fought redundancy. Some engineers wanted more feedback on what they were doing and how well they were doing it, and others wondered about opportunities for advancement.
The true significance of the reorg would not be immediately apparent, because shortly after we began rebuilding our world, the rest of the world fell apart.
A
S I DROVE
to work on September 11, 2001, my mind was on Ask Jeeves. Late the night before, Larry had sent around a
Wall Street Journal
article announcing that our competitor was buying Teoma, a promising new search engine. That worried me. The Jeeves brand was strong, though their search technology couldn't compare to Google's. If they actually improved it, they might become a formidable player in the industry.
On the car radio, I heard something about a plane crash in New York City. I envisioned a Piper Cub that had been sightseeing and gotten too close to a skyscraper. And then they were talking about another plane. Another plane had flown into the World Trade Center. Jet planes, filled with people. The World Trade Center was burning. People were jumping out of windows. Other planes were missing. No one knew what was going on.