When Can I Interview at Google Again
I nside a lobby at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, abreast a rank of 1990s arcade machines, a laminated sign asks people to "Please Be Googley". Information technology is a request that visitors remember to wear security badges; also that they don't steal any of the stuff that'due south been left effectually for staff enjoyment – pedal bikes, sombreros, electric guitars. Employees at this £250bn company get stock options as a bones condition of employment. Wacky office furnishings, also. Upstairs in what Google calls its people operations department – man resources – there's a climbing frame. A gym machine. Nigh sit down at desks, today, frowning and purposeful, but i immature staffer has taken a laptop to an indoor picnic table, next to the hammock.
In his part, Laszlo Bock, caput of people operations, handles the claims from outsiders asking: "Please let me be Googley." Each twelvemonth, around 2 one thousand thousand use for a job here and 5,000 are hired. Bock puts the average applicant'south odds at virtually 400/ane. On a wall he keeps a small display of some of the worst (Bock prefers "silliest") submissions that have come in. People try to grease him, impress him, plead with him, threaten him. He was offered, one time, a discount on a motorhome in return for an offer. And somebody mailed in a shoe; with this foot-in-the-door joke the hope, presumably, that an acceptance alphabetic character would be sent by render post.
Bock is 43, large-jawed, handsome, once an actress on Baywatch and all the same with the straight-backed begetting of a screen lifeguard. He joined Google ix years ago, when the brand was on its evolution from amusing picayune search engine to terrifyingly ambitious everything-engine: electronic mail, maps, operating systems, phones, shortly a phone network. Half-dozen years ago the visitor had half dozen,000 staff and now it is l,000-stiff – "the size of a respectable city," as Bock points out, one fabricated upwards of engineers, designers, marketers, lawyers, administrators, chefs and many of their dogs, who are welcome on site. If founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin settled this metropolis, and executive chairman Eric Schmidt serves as mayor, then Bock is something like its immigration chief: roaming the border in a dune buggy, binoculars beyond the mural, considering bids for entry.
"I was ownership a lottery ticket once," he tells me. "My blood brother said to me, 'I'm not buying a lottery ticket. And my odds are well-nigh the same every bit yours.'" He means: getting a chore here is difficult. "It's non hopeless, though." Bock will before long publish a book, Work Rules, in which he reveals some secrets about how Google identifies people information technology wants and how it spoils them once they're in. Fortune magazine has ranked Google its No ane most desirable identify to work for six years in a row, citing as 1 reason a new policy of distributing "baby bonding bucks" to staff. Had a child? Have $500. This is the kind of thing they practice.
I sit with Bock on piece of cake chairs in his part. He is used to assessing strangers in this room and I enquire him to give me the once-over. Showtime impression stuff. Would I be cutting out for Google?
He stares for a moment and says: "Well, first impressions, OK. British accent, tall, slender." He gestures at my trainers. "You've got your tongue out on top of the laces knot. Which actually solves an important problem for me, because information technology e'er looks atrocious the other way, with the knot out, and now I know the respond." He scans my face. "You've got the funky glasses but not, like, super funky. And so you're non highly affected…" He says I seem nice enough. "But stepping back from that, if I were considering you from a Google perspective? At this bespeak I would conclude I know nothing well-nigh you. I oasis't been able to appraise any of the things we care about yet."
What are the things yous intendance about?
"Four things." He lists them, in order of importance. First, "full general cerebral ability… Not just raw [intelligence] but the ability to absorb information." Second, "emergent leadership. The idea at that place being that when y'all see a trouble, you step in and attempt to accost it. And so you step out when y'all're no longer needed. That willingness to requite upward power is really important." The third matter, Bock says, "is cultural fit – nosotros telephone call it 'Googleyness' – but it boils downward to intellectual humility." He says you lot don't accept to exist dainty. "Or warm, or fuzzy. You just have to exist somebody who, when the facts show you're wrong, can say that." And fourth? "Expertise in the job we're gonna hire you for."
That comes last? "If you can practise the other things, non only most of the time will you lot figure out the chore, yous might come up up with a novel way of doing it nobody else has done earlier."
In Work Rules, Bock itemises staff privileges, some famous, some lesser known. There's the subsidised childcare, the dogsitting, the massage chairs. Hairdressers visit the site every Monday and mechanics come to service cars on a Tuesday. With a few clicks on the local intranet, employees can arrange, without management's approval or knowledge, surprise bonuses of $175 for each other – just considering. Should they dice, and should they be married, their spouses get on receiving one-half their salary for a decade. Two square meals a day. Free ice-cream!
Assuming the outsider tin still think for envy, reading this, they might wonder if Google ever wants its people to leave the site. Whether this is golden-cage stuff. In chat with me as well every bit in his book, Bock argues fiercely against the suggestion. "Google isn't some sweetly baited trap designed to trick people," he writes. He tells me he has no item interest in how long employees hang around. "If you're doing good work and getting information technology done, I don't sympathize why I would care what hours you lot work."
So the nine-to-five, that totem of work culture – bullshit? "Totally," Bock says. "Primal premise: people are good and want to benefit work. I don't intendance how and when and where."
B ock's book likewise has ane of those ambiguous titles dearest in business literature. Piece of work Rules: I read iii meanings into information technology. Here are some rules for work. Hither is something yous might shout, delightedly, in an office that has a climbing frame. And here's a thorny modern truth – that work rules the states now in a way it has not done before. "You spend more fourth dimension working than doing anything else in life. It's not correct that the experience," Bock writes, "should be so demotivating and dehumanising." He suggests rival companies might like to adopt some of Google's policies.
Flicking through the book, I go on imagining a CEO at a lesser house doing the aforementioned, digesting Bock's tips as to how to ensnare the world'south A-graders and 90th-percentile types. Having a Google executive explain how to attract desirables must be a niggling like having a part-time-modelling dr. pal (who tin can melt) propose y'all on how to be more than magnetic. Simply Bock writes well, and in his volume he opens the curtains a petty wider than before on this corporation, in control of and then much of gimmicky life, always insisting on its own transparency even while the cadre company is sequestered away in a remote HQ.
I take a bike ride across the Mountain View site, guided by a volunteer staffer. It's a warm day. On a pair of brightly painted Google-bikes, left almost for free employ, we bike past a fire station, a music venue, an adjoining airfield that Google recently took on so that its fleet of driverless cars could whizz near, unshackled. They call the whole site "the Googleplex" but if, like me, you detect that hard to breadbasket, the natives will besides settle for "the Google campus". I ask the staff fellow member why the streets have such boring names – Crittenden Lane, Charleston Road… Were this Apple tree they would long ago have been rechristened Solution Fashion, Future Avenue. "We don't own the land," she says, "and so nosotros don't proper name the roads."
Google moved into Mountain View effectually fifteen years ago. A small town off Highway 101, around 40 miles south of San Francisco, it was once dominated by almond farms. No longer. I'm told Google hasn't put upwardly a building here, they've only occupied more already in place. Merely the company has "kind of outgrown our existent-estate footprint", in Bock's words, and big-scale expansion plans were recently submitted to Mount View's local council. As it stands today the town is still sleepy, peaceful, blandly pretty. We prop upwards our bikes beside a water feature and when a line of ducks trots past, the staffer says: "Prop animals."
This lot know how we run across them. Warily, wearily. Dave Eggers's 2013 novel The Circle, a Nineteen Eighty-Four for the online age, imagined a cult-like tech business firm, one whose innovations increased a sense of social surveillance. Credible similarities between Eggers's fictional company and Google were noted, and I expect to learn that the novel would be a no-no on site. My tour guide tells me she remembers the book existence hotly discussed in campus cafeterias. (We agree that I won't name her.) Everybody seemed to have read it and nobody, as far as she knows, was offended.
Nosotros continue our bout on foot, going by the building that has a two-lane bowling alley, a climbing wall. I'k encouraged to pick from a flourishing strawberry plant. Beyond the way people play volleyball, some of them in Google-branded leisurewear. I look out for signs that the identify is a pressurised hothouse for its employees; a sort of prison house with soft-play walls. I don't run across it. People walk around unhurried, property laptops and water bottles, holographic security badges thwapping against their thighs. On a deckchair in the herb garden, an employee sunbathes. 1 guy whirrs by on an electrical skateboard.
I ask my guide, who is wearing a summertime clothes, if she'd e'er come to work in a Google T-shirt. She gives me a long look and says: "Simply if I had no other clean clothes."
Millions desire to work here – only not everybody does. I look the biggest challenge for outsiders who were at all cynical, or self-reliant, would be the daily grapple with Google's institutional devotion to zaniness. In Piece of work Rules, Bock mentions unicycling clubs, juggling clubs, the tireless nicknaming, with "Googler", an umbrella term for employees, broken down into "Noogler" for new arrivals, "Graygler" for older hands, "Jewgler", "Gaygler". You cannot be on site long before hearing about the weekly all-staff meetings. They're called TGIFs, or Thank-God-It's-Fridays. And they're staged on Thursdays!
Merely there is a more knowing humour beneath the panto. When I tell Bock about my efforts to get inside the building on arrival – how, as I pawed at a locked door, a polite boy in shorts interrupted to direct me to i of the lobbies – Bock says: "Most people don't know this. But that guy? Trained killer. Had yous tried to penetrate further that would've been it for you." He carries on, poker-faced, about the number of visiting parents and grandparents who've been reluctantly assassinated this way…
Bock enjoys the riff and and so do I. Afterwards a press officer leans in to clarify, "No grandmas go whacked at Google."
T he printing officer's name is Meghan Casserly. Her hiring was a telling case of the company's privileged, take-accuse policy on recruitment. Bock writes in Work Rules that, far from sending in emails, or shoes, Google doesn't really want you to approach them. "The odds of hiring a smashing person based on inbound applications are low," he writes. Preferred is the picket, the long stalk. He tells me the recruiting corps at Google might eye a target for years. "And then, y'know, when they're having a bad mean solar day – that's when nosotros strike. I'thousand joking a little bit. Merely nosotros desire to be at that place at those moments, when someone's like, 'You know what? I dearest what I'm doing but at present's the fourth dimension to attempt something different.'"
In 2012 Casserly was a journalist at Forbes, assigned to interview Bock. During their chat he let skid most those preposterous death benefits, not however made public past the company. (Besides as the half-the-bacon matter, Google immediately pays out the value of any unvested stock to an employee'due south bereaved partner. It then contributes $1,000 a month for whatsoever children until they come up of age.) Casserly wrote up the story with the headline, "Here's What Happens To Google Employees When They Die." A big scoop.
"We thought, man, she'southward fantastic," recalls Bock. His team approached Casserly about a job in the printing office and she agreed to employ, she tells me, but because she thought she might write another article nearly information technology. Her editor at Forbes was in on the program. Then, she says, the conversations with Google got "libation and cooler. And the money was… interesting." She joined about a year agone, a graduate, recently, from her "Noogler" status. She sits in on my conversation with Bock and monitors for indiscretions. At one signal she instructs him, "Stop saying cult!"
Bock and I have been talking well-nigh some of the negative perceptions of Google. That information technology's cult-similar. That it's smug. Perceptions, I should say, his book won't practise an atrocious lot to dissuade. Every bit early as the beginning page, he compares founders Folio and Brin to Romulus and Remus; also to Thomas Edison, Oprah Winfrey and Superman. Bock says he's aware that internal zeal may not scan well from the outside. He jokes: "I of the defining elements of any cult is that from the outside it totally looks like a cult, and from the inside anybody denies information technology's a cult."
Google, he knows, can appear shut away. "Hermetically sealed. For instance nosotros don't have many leaks for a visitor of our size." He insists the vibe from within is more mutinous. "There'south this roiling, abiding debate and statement and fighting. Because we do have people who represent all kinds of different perspectives – we even take luddites who recollect technology's ruining the world. Debate is part of the cloth of who we are." He looks at Casserly, an apology before using the forbidden discussion once more. "You go cult-like when y'all have a single set of behavior and you say, 'This is the answer and yous're non immune to question that.' Not the case here."
What about the smugness? Google's assumption, in both of the word'south senses, can exist staggering. The public backlash against those early-adopters who started wearing Google Glass glasses a year ago – "Glass-holes" – might exist seen equally a manifestation of a larger frustration with the company and its seizure of ubiquity, its pitter-patter into positions of ever greater influence. (In this world and across: the company will soon send up drones to blip back Wi-Fi from lower space.) Many are upset by Google's squinty position on internet censorship in Red china, interpreting information technology as complicity with an oppressive government. In the US in that location have been significant government investigations into anticompetitive practices at Google, since wound down, though non earlier damning accusations were made. A similar inquiry launched by the European commission goes on.
Publicly, I think, unease was most palpable when an armada of Google'due south camera-equipped Subaru cars, touring the globe and taking photos to prettify its map service, turned out to exist arresting data from people's personal Wi-Fi accounts en route. "So how did this happen?" Google commented in a blogpost from 2010. "Quite simply, it was a error." The chummy not-amends was tin-eared. Experts wondered about that "error", pointing out that Subarus don't teach themselves to plunder private data. In 2012 Wired published an article about the fiasco that it headlined "An Intentional Mistake".
Bock: "From a perception perspective, I mean, expect – we haven't been equally good equally nosotros ought to exist in meeting with unlike communities outside of Google that care deeply about what we do. If yous wait at privacy… we haven't done as good or thoughtful a chore of having those conversations [as we might have]. We're getting amend. Merely we haven't done as good a task [every bit we might have] on that." He admits that Google sometimes gets stuff wrong. "I call back there's a lot of perceptions. And some of them are of our own making."
What does he mean by that?
"There's a lot of responsibility that comes with having a global brand, and the kind of footprint we take, and the kind of impact nosotros accept, and we need to live up to that. And, by the way," he adds, veering back to the smugness issue, "we rent people who are very loftier IQ. Not very high EQ."
Sharp only not emotionally sharp, he means. I'm surprised to hear him acknowledge this. It would explain a lot. Bock says: "Nosotros don't always realise how some of our folks come up across. More often than not, it's very well intentioned. So from the outside, yes, I absolutely come across that we need to get amend, and work to alter the perception, and get in more than in line with how Googlers see themselves. Only fifty-fifty within, yeah, there are some people who are smug. They're a minority."
He writes in his book nigh "a pocket-size just odious segment of Googlers" who, among other internal misdemeanours, have abused the free meals system. Anybody eats for nothing here. Bock has caught people stashing takeaway boxes in their cars, pinching handfuls of granola bars for weekend hiking trips. Not long ago in that location was a campaign of resistance confronting Meatless Mondays, Google'south exercise of offer merely vegetarian meals once a week. In a chapter called It'southward Non All Unicorns And Rainbows, Bock recounts the protest barbecues and silverware thrown away in acrimony. He quotes an electronic mail sent to him by a campaigner. "Stop trying to tell me how to live my life… Seriously stop this shit or I'll go to Microsoft, Twitter or Facebook where they don't fuck with us."
Bock ways for us to be shocked by this but I find information technology gratifying to know that in amongst all the super-people, a little corps of the sub par take snuck in. Fuck-Youglers, I call them.
I ask him, when they reveal themselves, these bad'uns, does he experience he'south failed every bit a recruiter? "Aye. Everyone makes mistakes and we do, likewise. So you rent some people who are jerks."
B ack to that 400/1 chance for new applicants. I speak to a bookmaker at William Hill who offers me but slightly longer odds, 500/i, on my becoming prime number minister. What can hopefuls do to better their appalling chances of a job at Google?
Effort to compete in at least one Olympic Games. (At that place are one-half a dozen old Olympians on the books.) Win an Academy Award or a Turing honor. (Google has these, too.) Bock reveals that at that place's no point brushing upwardly on clever-clever logic questions, brainteasers about things like lawn tennis assurance in swimming pools, because they've done away with that in interviews. The company once plastered a giant maths equation on a billboard and invited anyone who could solve it to employ, but no hires resulted. These days he puts greater trust in the blunt, 2D question. Tell me most a problem you lot've solved, tell me virtually a time you've squabbled with a colleague.
Never tick off Larry Folio. Even though this is now a urban center-sized operation, Page still enjoys the final say on every newcomer. How oft can it happen, that an applicant gets all the manner to the gates only to be barred by Romulus himself? Bock says in one case in a while. "A lot less than five or 10 years agone. Then it would be a weekly affair: 'Non this 1, not that i.' Considering what he was doing was calibrating all of united states of america, saying: 'This is what truly great looks like.'"
Who knows, Google might come and get me after this. I catch Bock looking on approvingly while I snoop effectually his office, making notes about the climbing frame and the (vast) coffee selection. I appear to score large points for suggesting that those generous expiry benefits must, in the stop, make information technology more likely for a Googler's partner to murder them. ("That was pointed out internally.") And there was the impressive affair I'd done with my shoelaces.
If a call comes, the chances of acceptance here soar – to about ane/100. For whatever open position, Google will exist interrogating 100 people simultaneously. After six weeks of this, 99 are rejected. They're non told why. "If somebody just breaks up with you lot," Bock says, "that's not the time to hear: 'And really, next time, send more flowers'… For the most office people really aren't excited to get that feedback, because they really wanted the job. They argue. They're not in a place where they can larn."
So what happens?
"We just say, 'Congratulations, you're hired.' Or, 'Sorry, it didn't work out. Please use once more.'"
- Work Rules! Insights From Inside Google That Volition Transform How You lot Live And Lead by Laszlo Bock, is published on ix April by John Murray, at £20. To order a copy for £xvi, get to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
- This article was edited on 6 Apr 2015. In the original, we said Bock joined Google half dozen years ago when in fact he started with the visitor in 2006. This has been corrected.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/04/how-to-get-job-at-google-meet-man-hires-fires
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