Unlike Cringely, I would not call it The People’s Republic of Google, based on this description — but it’s definitely not a normal business either:
Google isn’t organized like any tech company I’ve ever worked in, that’s for sure. Peer review seems to be at the heart of nearly everything. Yes, there are executives doing whatever it is that executives do up in the Eric/Larry/Sergeysphere, but down where the bits meet the bus most decisions seem to be reached through a combination of peer review-driven concensus and literal popularity polls.The heart of Google is code and all code there is peer reviewed TO DEATH. The result is absolutely the cleanest code in the digital world, forced into that condition by what can be a torturous process of line-by-comment-by punctuation mark analysis sometimes over-driven by people who take their work WAY too seriously. You know the type. Peer review wars have apparently been known to break out at Google, though rarely. Usually the pedants are accommodated and, in fact, they for the most part win. The code is clean as a result, but the process is s-l-o-w, or so I’ve been told.
And the code had better be clean, because at Google developers outnumber testers by 50-to-1.
But peer review at Google goes way beyond looking at the code. Hiring requires peer review. Promotion requires peer review. Presumably even firing requires peer review, though I didn’t have anyone actually tell me that. All the technical workers at Google are involved in peer review activities a LOT of the time — up to 20 percent, in fact.
Which brings us to the vaunted 20 percent time Google engineers are supposed to get to work on anything they like. Most of them apparently use that time for corporate housekeeping — for doing all that peer reviewing. It makes sense: if you want to appear productive in your main job yet are still required to do all this work that would normally be handled by managers, when else can you do it but during time you don’t have to account for?
This may be part of the reason that the Google 20 percent time hasn’t spawned as many new products as I expected it would.
This is where it gets odd:
At Google I am told developers bid for what they want to do with their time. If there’s a big job to be done people commit to parts of it. And the parts nobody commits to do? They don’t get done. Really. So when we wonder exactly how a JotSpot, which I really liked, turns into a Google Sites, which I really don’t like, that morphology apparently comes from people changing what they want to change.There is no marketing input.
Effectively, there is no marketing.
I am not making this up.