More on the day to day life at Google

August 30, 2004

A new excerpt from a Playboy magazine interview with Google's two young co-founders sheds light on just how loosely the engineers run at the search engine company.

Adding to an article first released three weeks ago, Playboy last week posted additional excerpts from its interview -- largely comments by co-founder Larry Page about how the engineers are still in charge. The difference for Schmidt, of course, is that the Mountain View company now employs more than 2,000 people -- up from just 1,000 last year.

Page said Google keeps the management ranks as thin as possible, so that less time is wasted by people simply managing other people.

Instead of telling employees which project to work on, Google leaves it for the employees to decide. ``We have a system that engineers can update to put themselves on another project,'' Page explained.

``Someone else might say, `Whoa, wait a second. I don't want people to be able to do that.' Well, it turns out you have two choices: You can try to control people, or you can try to have a system that represents reality.''

Page did add that everyone in the company needs to answer a weekly e-mail from the computer system about what they did the previous week.

SURE BEATS CODING: Some employees of chip maker AMD have been working on skills that go way beyond designing transistor gates and creating PowerPoint presentations.

Sunnyvale-based Advanced Micro Devices's memory chip division had a summer picnic for workers to celebrate the one-year anniversary of forming a joint venture with Fujitsu. The memory chip business, now called Spansion, picnicked at Baylands Park in Sunnyvale.

Employees and executives split up into teams to play games. They had an egg toss. They raced to fill a bottle with water using a sponge; team members had to race across a field with a partner and the wet sponge between their hips. In the spirit of the Olympics, teams picked a name of a country and had to construct something associated with it, in 15 minutes, with limited materials and things found in the park.

Executives joined in a pie-eating contest. Fortunately for AMD, pie-eating skills do not equate with business acumen. Spansion's president, Bertrand Cambou, a tall thin Frenchman, didn't fare very well. His team scored the fewest points.

GOING TETE A TETE: A lot of the sizzle at last week's Hot Chips semiconductor design conference at Stanford University came as six panelists squared off on the emotional subject of outsourcing engineering work to low-cost countries.

The audience of engineers appeared to favor the anti-offshoring arguments. One panelist, T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, said he had tried to resist moving chip assembly work abroad in the 1980s, but paid for it when companies undercut him on costs. Now he says he outsources engineering to stay competitive.

Rodgers was grilled by Natasha Humphries, a laid-off worker and anti-offshoring activist who had to train her own replacement in India while she worked for PalmOne.

Cary Snyder, a technology analyst at SemiView and moderator of an offshoring message group, said it was a bogus to say that workers can retrain themselves when the highest-skill jobs are moving overseas. ``My 18-year-old son doesn't want to go into high-tech anymore because of this.''

AD CLUTTER?: One of the appeals of craigslist, the popular San Francisco-based classifieds Web site, has always been its clean, ad-free look.

A German journalist reports, via the PaidContent.org Web site, that craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster said he was intrigued by the idea of running Google ads on his site. You've no doubt seen those little Google text ads on Web sites, designed to match the sites' content.

In a follow-up e-mail to PaidContent, Buckmaster said that if it becomes possible to better match such ads to craigslist's local sites, ``it becomes more difficult to dismiss the possibility of experimenting with such ads out of hand.''

Source: Silicon Valley.com

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