The great Yahoo DrupalCon, formerly know as OSCMS, was my first visit to the Mecca of Search (Sunnyvale/Mountain View) and the experience was just made complete a few days ago. A friend of mine asked me to accompany him to a meeting at the Microsoft offices in Mountain View. He was presenting one of his inventions to some Microsoft bigwigs and wanted me to come along as a technical consult. It sounded interesting...
We met at Microsoft's Mountain View campus, got a look around (clean & corporate, no surprise there) and the meeting was indeed interesting. But then the fun began... as we made small talk, I mentioned that this was my second trip to the area, yet I still hadn't seen the Google campus. They laughed and one of our hosts offered to call a friend to arrange lunch and a private tour of the Googleplex.
Well, I jumped all over that one -- and an hour later we were strolling around building 43 at the center of the Googleplex. As it turns out, our "guide" at Google had been a Microsoft .NET big-shot who was poached by Google and now heads up one of Google's core search groups. He was easily as interesting as the tour itself!
Everyone's heard about the Google campus already -- so I won't repeat everything about the fresh juice bars, mandatory coffee-stations every 200 feet, totally relaxed atmosphere, pool, volleyball etc. It seemed like 1/3 of the staff were working hard and the rest were playing hard.
In comparison, Microsoft seemed pretty sterile, both Microsoft and Yahoo are clean, calm and professional while the Googleplex is messy, bustling and frenetic -- overflowing with fun. I've always thought I was lucky to work from home -- but now I'm not so sure. Working at the Googleplex looked like a blast!
I was somewhat surprised at the seeming lack of security -- especially after seeing Yahoo so buttoned-up. We wandered freely through the core-search area watching engineers hack away in fairly tightly packed workspaces. The developer areas were open, messy and highly personalized. One guy I noticed in particular had what appeared to be two 32" monitors each rotated 90 degrees and set side-by side in what can only be described as the Great Wall of Pixels.
After spending years trying to read Google's mind, it was very cool to spend an hour in SEO Graceland. Of course my real fantasy would be to have a couple weeks time to hang out, play pool and chat with search developers. ;)
ChadJ
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That sounds awesome!
I'm not sure how I'd like working for one of those huge places, but visiting them is indeed fun. And certainly they have their share of great minds, too. Thanks for sharing!
Google is definitely better
I agree, Yahoo and M$ seemed sterile to me as well. There's something to be said for building a village. Actually, on that note, I found google to be more like a damn town than anything else.
On the one hand, you'd never leave (I hear they even do 24 hour daycare). On the other hand... that could get old. I'd still love to work there at some point, just to be around all the good work energy. ;-)
Just give me a week...
Yeah, the energy was awesome -- and so was the casual conversation. I've never been around so many people who actually understood search.
I've always been pretty good at putting puzzle pieces together -- figuring out secrets by meshing the ragged edges of multiple conversations. I think with a week at Google, hanging around with the right people, I could figure out answers to all the core search questions: how keyword reputation works, how the penalty regime works, the relationship between age, trust and link authority and how much of the algorithm is really algorithmic.
So much of the search industry is people with very little actual experience repeating stupid conjecture they hear at Webmasterworld. Just give me one week in area 43... ;)
ChadJ
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