as “flat,” and said her mission is to ensure that it stays that way. The reason the founders “smashed together” employees—making them share offices and work in teams on projects—is to “create a company everyone wants to work at,” to impose a team culture. She described her task this way: “My role is to help facilitate and orchestrate the culture.” It is no accident, many Googlers believe, that in 2007 and 2008 Fortune magazine christened Google the best U.S. company to work for.
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