Monday, May 19, 2008

Is it so Great to Work for Google?


"America's best place to work"

Biggest internet success in history. There must be something.
$150 billion dollars
More than 10,000 employees worldwide
Drinks, snacks, meals everything is free. Cookie jars, people bring in their dogs -I assume to watch them work or work with them, you never know with Google.
Gym, pool, voleyball court, ping pong, dry cleaning laundry, shoe repair, concierge service, barber shop, baby sitting, 5 doctors for free check ups, massage, how can this culture of entertainment succeed outside of Hollywood?
They receive 3000 job applications a day, I am not impressed at all. How people won't like to play errrrr I mean work in a place like that? Of course it will remain people's best working place as long as they offer free food, laundry, games and all that teenagers crave for.
11 restaurants, refer a friend to work at Google? $2,000.
I wonder...WHEN THOSE PEOPLE DO WORK!?? How can they be productive with so many distractions? If I take a day off from work and decide to do my laundry, go to the gym, have a massage, play with the turtle and then go to the voleyball court to play I wonder...wouldn't that take all my day away?
Google has such tremendous success not because these superflous and frivolous ways of working but because the tremendous power its company model represents on the internet. They could be more profitable and productive without all those kids' gadgets -just concentrating on their daily working challenges that Larry Page and Sergey Brin created 10 years ago.

I am not so sure Airbus Aérospatiale would be better off if the management decided to offer free cookie jars with Winnie Pooh designs and skating along their facility for their productive engineers dressed only with a pijama and Spider Man slippers .