Googled: The End of the World As We Know It by Ken Auletta

Author:Ken Auletta
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Industries, Web, Social Science, Internet industry, Corporate & Business History, Media & Communications Industries, Internet, Computer Industry, Infrastructure, Media Studies, World Wide Web, Economics, Social Aspects, Computers, United States, Search Engines, Internet searching, Business & Economics, History, Non-fiction, Popular Culture, General, Web search engines
ISBN: 9780143118046
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-10-26T09:20:33.620000+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Google Enters Adolescence

(2007-2008)

For all its democratic ethos, its belief in “the wisdom of crowds,” at Google the engineer is king, held above the crowd. The vaunted 20 percent time that is parceled out selectively by management to nonengineers is given universally to the half of Google employees who are technically trained. Salaries for engineers are relatively modest—a beginning engineer starts at around $100,000 (versus about $50,000 for nonengineers), and rises to about $300,000, including a bonus—but stock rewards are extravagant. Google rewarded its employees with $868.6 million in stock in 2007, a one-year increase of more than 90 percent.

The importance the company attaches to engineers is spotlighted by the time Google’s founders and CEO Schmidt devote to meetings with them. Their Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons are crammed with Google Product Strategy (GPS) reviews. Teams made up mostly of engineers meet in a long, dimly lit, low-ceilinged conference room named Mar rakesh, on the second floor of Building 43, next to the office that Page and Brin share. Industrial gray carpet covers the floor and melts into the gray walls. A massive, pale oak custom-made rectangular table stretches almost the full length of the room; at one end are billowy red-velvet couches, and at the other, large, flat LCD screens. Whiteboards line the walls. There are two projectors, so time is not wasted unloading and reloading projectors during multiple presentations, and all cables and wires are color coded to minimize time locating the right connections for laptops and other electronic devices.

Meetings last from fifteen minutes to two hours, and are scheduled one after another, like airport takeoffs and landings. “If you want to talk to Larry or Sergey, you can at one of these meetings,” said Vice President Megan Smith. “If you work at another company, can you get to the CEO within seven days? Probably not.” Often at these meetings, said Tim Armstrong, “Larry is going to take one side of the argument and Sergey is going to take the exact opposite side, and what you’re going to see is that everyone is going to argue in the middle and at some point it is going to be clear what the answer is.” This is a process that allows Page and Brin to learn, he said, “who comes to the meeting prepared” and who has the passion and guts to challenge them.

A meeting on October 9, 2007, did not quite follow this pattern. Brin and Page were to meet with an engineering team to review their proposal for an upgrade of AdWords 1.0. Since its introduction in early 2002, some parts of AdWords had been substantially upgraded while others had not. Small businesses complained that the system was too complicated. Larger customers, such as eBay or Amazon, complained that they wanted new features, including an ability to organize their accounts by products and to break out expenditures by country. To make these functions work, Google needed to enlarge its computers that retained data and enhance the speed of the advertising auctions.

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