Google is both egalitarian and elitist. Salaries are modest, and there are no executive dining rooms. The two founders and CEO Schmidt (all now billionaires) have insisted on being paid $1 a year and have declined stock option grants since 2004; they were each paid bonuses of $1,700 in 2007 and declined bonuses altogether in 2008. The top salary of $450,000 was paid equally to the other members of the executive committee, who in most cases received bonues equal to 150 percent of their salary. Most employees are invited to share the riches. Google projected that stock option grants to employees in 2008 would total $1.1 billion. These grants confer millionaire status on many Googlers. Google’s approach to users is also egalitarian, from its reliance on “the wisdom of crowds” approach to search results to its demonstrated faith in “open source” systems.
It is a close-knit culture. Google is not egalitarian about sharing information with outsiders. Ask just about any Googler basic questions-How many searches does Google perform each day? How many of its employees are non-Americans? What is the starting salary of engineers?-and you’ll receive a robotic, “We don’t disclose those numbers for competitive reasons.” Google has deliberately set out to build a team culture composed of elite performers, and an inevitable consequence is that it can be an opaque and insular culture.
Google’s hiring practices are certainly elitist. On the first day of work at Google, new employees attend an all-day orientation session at which they are told how few of the more than one million yearly applicants were hired at Google. They are reassured that more applicants are accepted by Harvard (about 7 percent) than are hired by Google (about 1 percent). The screening process relies on measurable things, like grades and SAT scores.
The applicants most scrutinized are the engineers and technical employees, who make up half of Google’s work force. “It’s an engineering-driven and -focused culture,” said a former Google executive who did not wish to be identified. “The founders don’t value marketing”-or most nonengi neering disciplines. Larry Page is aggressively disdainful of marketing and public relations. In early 2008, Page instructed Google’s public relations department, which consisted of 130 people, that he would only give them a total of eight hours of his time that year for press conferences, speeches, or interviews.
The thirst to quantify everything drove several visual designers to quit Google in early 2009. Douglas Bowman, who was hired as Google’s first visual designer in May 2006, wrote a blog explaining why he left. “When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems,” he wrote. Google wanted to test market every color, every design. Unlike Apple, Google was more concerned with functionality than taste, elegance. Management, said Bowman, pushed to “reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data… And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.”
Google honors its engineers as creators, treating them the way the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker suggested a half century ago that companies should treat “knowledge workers,” said Hal R. Varian, Google’s chief economist. But an engineering-dominated culture has drawbacks. “In some ways, they have not done enough to communicate what they are doing internally or externally,” said Paul Buchheit, Google’s twenty-third employee, the one who coined their “Don’t be evil” motto and who left with three other Googlers to launch a social network, FriendFeed, in 2006. “Part of the culture is not to communicate. That’s what we did when we started Gmail. We put it out without an announcement.” In beta testing new products, Google does get feedback from users. But something else is at work here as well. Engineers are rarely accomplished communi cators. Google is a culture dominated by a belief in science, in data, and facts, not instinct or perception or opinion. This reflects not just a disdain for public relations, but also a whiff of arrogance.
Whether the employee is an engineer, a manager, or a marketer, a belief in the company’s virtue is central to the Google culture. From day one, Google forfeited advertising revenues by refusing to run ads on its home page and by refusing to allow advertisers-as competitors like GoTo did-to pay to get their products ranked higher in search results. Google could run more ads than it does, but instead discards ads that don’t attract clicks or are not deemed “relevant” to users as information. At the core of the Google value system, said engineer Matt Cutts, is the belief that the user experience matters most, and if the user experience is simple, and fast, and uncluttered with ads, and if Google makes no attempt to steer users to its own sites, a bond of trust will form. “We maintain a church/state wall” between the information a Google search provides and advertising, said Larry Page, who likened what Google does to how newspapers strive to keep the influence of advertisers away from the reporting of news because “there is an inherent conflict between the two.”
Google won friends among users by being free; it won friends among advertisers by charging only if users clicked on the text ad; it won friends among news readers with Google News, which is both free and until early 2009 was ad-free; it won friends among Web sites and small businesses by generating advertising dollars and new customers. From its second auction program, AdSense, Google said it pockets 20 percent of the revenues, giving the rest to these Web sites, or what Google calls its business partners. (Actually, said several of those partners, Google also charges 10 percent of “overhead” costs, so partners net about two-thirds.) Google, in 2008, provided a total of over five billion dollars to its hundreds of thousands of “partners.” Little wonder, then, that Google was often seen as a savior by those dependent on the Web. Jason Calacanis, who cofounded Weblogs, Inc., a company that publishes blogs, said AdSense generated in 2008 a total of four thousand dollars a day in advertising income for his bloggers.
Google does its part to address global warming. It places on its roofs the largest installation of solar photovoltaic panels of any corporate campus in the United States, generating sufficient electricity to power one thousand homes. It has solar-powered stations in its outdoor parking lots to charge its fleet of hybrid cars, and offers subsidies (five thousand dollars at first and now three thousand) to any employee who purchases a hybrid that gets at least forty-five miles per gallon (one thousand employees have received this subsidy). The company earmarks 1 percent of its profits to its philanthropic arm, the Google Foundation. CEO Schmidt sometimes lapses into speaking of Google as a “moral force,” as if its purpose were to save the world, not make money.