The visit to Googleland
Remember these childhood dreams, where you imagined that you would once work in a place that consists entirely of chocolate and where you could just indulge in sweets all day, maybe taking a nap in between? Well, as you probably have realized until now, this place doesn’t exist. But: The Google offices in Zurich come quite close.
Antoine and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Google’s Zurich offices, where more than 450 people, most of them engineers, work on search quality and many other projects. Our competent guide to the five floors of Googleland was Matthias Meyer, Spokesperson for Google Switzerland. Matthias clearly enjoyed showing us around – no wonder, because what Google offers its employees is almost certainly unparalleled.
There is food and drinks almost everywhere – and it is all free (and, by the way, excellent). In addition to the main canteen serving three meals a day, there are “mini-kitchens” on every floor, stocked with drinks, ice cream, bread and snacks. To counterbalance this diet, the office also has a nice gym, complete with trainers. If exercising isn’t your thing, you can also get a massage or take a nap in the massage chair.
Or maybe you’re stuck in the work you’re doing and need to get some fresh ideas? For that, there are not one, but several playrooms with billard tables, table tennis, air hockey, Nintendo Wii’s and almost every other imaginable game. And to top things off: There is a huge slide going down from the first floor to the canteen. We tried it, and it’s awesome.
All of this is of course nice – but the reasons for Google’s success also lie in the way the company is structured. Google, although 22’000 employees strong today, prides itself on still working like “a lot of small startups”, as Matthias told us. Teams can work very independently, and innovation is driven by the famous “20-percent-rule” that allows every employee to work one day per week on his or her own projects (GMail originally was one of these projects).
But if it is fun, it is serious fun: As Matthias says, Google engineers are obsessed with two things: The user – and data. Google collects enormous amounts of nonpersonal data (Matthias emphasized that they take data privacy seriously), analyzes it meticulously and uses it to take decisions and improve their services. (For a good example, read this fantastic Wired article on the economics behind the Google advertising system).
The enormous innovative drive that made Google so successful thus seems to be based in a combination of focus on data, flexibility and independence – and giant slides. It very obviously is working.
On the 16. November 2009 at 09:01 o'Clock
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