I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

Author:Douglas Edwards [Edwards, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: google
Published: 2011-07-12T06:05:37+00:00

Wait a Minute Mr. Postman

Each time a Googlebomb detonated it blew my schedule to hell. I'd have to drop everything to smother the flame wars that might damage our brand. User support cast ominous shadows across my world, but the poor grunt who faced the unending deluge of incoming missives was our sole customer service rep, Max Erdstein.

Fresh out of Stanford with a degree in history, Max had offered to do whatever needed to be done at Google, which initially meant working on writing projects like the Google Friends newsletter and responding to user email. After Cindy restructured the marketing group, Max moved into my world, dragging behind him responsibility for Google's rickety user-support department, which at the time consisted of Max, a laptop, and an off-the-shelf copy of Microsoft Outlook.

Max never envisioned customer service becoming an omnivorous blob consuming all his time, but soon he found himself responding robotically to more than a thousand emails a day from users around the world. Crushed under the load, he could do little more than succinctly reply, "Thanks! Keep on Googlin!" Non-English emails presented the biggest problem. We had no idea if people wanted to praise us or harangue us. We tried using off-the-web translation software, but it left us more confused than when we began.

Meanwhile, there were rumblings from sales VP Omid that supporting advertisers and search-services customers should be a higher priority. Could Max help with that, too? After all, unlike users, these people were actually paying us. Max was emptying an ocean with a teaspoon. As the backlog of unanswered emails began to swell, Sergey offered a useful perspective. "Why do we need to answer user email anyway?" he wanted to know.

To Sergey's thinking, responding to user questions was inefficient. If they wrote us about problems with Google, that was useful information to have. We should note the problems and fix them. That would make the users happier than if we wasted time explaining to them that we were working on the bugs. If users sent us compliments, we didn't need to write back because they already liked us. So really, wouldn't it be better not to respond at all? Or at best, maybe write some code to generate random replies that would be fine in most cases?

Given their lack of concern about unanswered email, the founders were not sympathetic to Max's distress over the monotonous and unfulfilling nature of his work. Besides, when Google started, Larry and Sergey had answered all the email themselves, and written the code, and designed the logo, and handled press inquiries. We had more resources now, so how could anyone complain, given that we all had such small shards of responsibility in the wake of the big bang that was Google's conversion from a two-person project to a full-fledged corporation?

Eventually I realized that the answer, as always, was in the data. In the spring of 2000, I had Max start quantifying how many emails per day he received and responded to. I plotted

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