Work-life balance and Google

I’ve seen this Lockergnome article about what it’s “really” like to work at Google linked to from a lot of places, most recently by Marco Arment. The article, apparently based on an interview with current and former Google employees, describes the supposed pressure on Googlers to work unhealthy long hours at the expense of family and personal life. The most damning snippet, the one that Marco highlighted in his own commentary, is the following:

While he says there is no direct pressure to conform to “crazy hours,” he hints at the reason he lives a Google-centric life: His pay is directly related to the amount of time he spends with Google. For those who can’t keep up with the demand, they simply have no choice but to leave, as previous (and notably older) Google employees have done when they must make the choice between raising a family or getting a raise. (I personally know at least one former Seattle-area Googler who quit under similar circumstances after being forced to either choose seeing his newborn less, or receive a demotion if he didn’t travel more.)

I can’t claim that this description is untrue—it apparently came from someone’s direct experience, and I have to assume that they were telling the truth—but what I can say is that it doesn’t resemble in any way my experience of working for Google at any point in the last five years. Not only that, but everyone I’ve spoken to about it is as surprised as I am to see this kind of picture painted of our workplace. If that paragraph is true of some Googlers, it certainly isn’t true of most of us.

Certainly there are times when I’m in the office until late in the evening, sometimes as late as 10PM. But my impression, without having any data to back this claim up, is that these long evenings are at least made up for by corresponding late mornings, early evenings, and flexibility to leave the office during the day to do things that can’t be done (or can’t as easily be done) outside of normal office hours.

Many of the people I work with are married, and a decent number have children. They have just as much freedom to work a regular 9–5 day as I have to work wildly irregular times. It’s whatever suits the individual. If your life is set up such that regularity and structure are beneficial to you, because you have commitments to your spouse or because you want to see your kids before their bedtime, you should have no problems living by those hours in all but exceptional circumstances. And if you like to be able to leave early one day to go to an event and stay late the next to make up the time (not that anyone’s counting the hours, but you need to get something done some time) then that’s an option too.

In a company the size of Google, there are bound to be some people who don’t get on as well as they’d hoped to, or teams that aren’t as forgiving or as welcoming as the rest of the organization is. But it’s important to me for people to realize that that’s not the majority experience. It’s certainly not my experience.

Learning to drive

Last summer I went on holiday with some friends I used to work with back in Dublin (some of whom I’m lucky enough still to work with in London). We rented a villa in Sicily, and a few cars to ferry the 11 of us around the island. It was while being chauffeured around the Italian countryside that I reflected on my inability to repay the favour being paid to me by my friends in the drivers’ seats.

So, despite living in the centre of Europe’s largest metropolis, with a public transport system to rival anywhere else in the world—as well as parking spaces that cost as much as a small apartment to rent—I resolved to finally acquire a licence to drive.

I did start learning when I lived in Ireland, before I moved to Dublin. I passed the theory test, got a provisional licence and had a few paid lessons and a few ad-hoc ones. But when I moved to Dublin I no longer had access to a car. And living five minutes’ walk from my office made it less pressing. Moving from there to London only made me less inclined to get driving.

Now that I’ve been in London for more than two years I’m starting to realize the potential benefits of driving. I’d be less restricted on holidays, like I said. I’d also gain a lot of freedom on work trips—many places, in the USA especially, are pretty hard to survive in without a car. And I could see a lot more of my adoptive home if I wasn’t restricted to places near a train station. In the time I’ve been here I’ve left London by plane far more often than by any other means of transport, and I’ve seen little if any of England outside of the major cities.

So it all added up to a decision that 2012 would be the year I would get my licence. On January 1 I requested the forms I need to apply for a provisional licence. All I need now is a passport size photo and a stretch of four weeks or so during which I won’t need my passport, as I’m required to send that in along with the application. Oh, and then I just have to actually learn, and pass the test.

Learn to code: addendum

In the spirit of the new year and the acquisition of new skills, and in the unlikely event that my last post inspired anyone to take a look at learning to code, have a look at Code Year. This site aims to teach people how to code, in weekly installments over the course of the year.

Learn to code

There’s a lot of talk happening right now, in Twitter and elsewhere, about whether coding—programming computers—is a skill that should be learned by most people as a basic tool to make their lives easier, or whether it can happily remain a skill restricted to those of us who do it for a living.

Daniel Jalkut, creator of MarsEdit, suggests that current levels of programming literacy can be compared to a period in the past where literacy itself was rare. He extrapolates from there, and concludes that the ability to program could become a similarly fundamental skill.

Literacy isn’t about becoming a Hemingway or a Chabon. It’s about learning the basic tools to get a job done. I think programming — coding — is much the same. You don’t have to be the world’s best programmer to develop a means of expressing yourself, of solving a problem, of making something happen.

There’s no question that a lot of people would benefit from knowing how to code. If you’ve ever done anything repetitive at a computer you would have been better off knowing how to get it done automatically. Every programmer I know has tales of seeing people slog through monotonous tasks that could have been accomplished by a computer in a matter of moments. Think of things like renaming files one-by-one, or copying snippets of data from one file to another file in a different format.

If that sounds familiar then you’re probably doing work that a computer could do much faster and more accurately than you can. If only you knew the right way to instruct the computer to do it for you.

There’s another side to this coin though. Sure, knowing how to code might have helped you out once in a while. But similarly there have been times in my life that things would have gone smoother for me if I’d known the Spanish for, “No, I’m not in the market for a donkey right now.” And yet I’ve never learned Spanish. It’s a matter of choosing to learn the skills that will be useful often, versus those that will be useful only occasionally. (I’m ignoring here the motivating factor that coding can be a lot of fun.)

My justification for not learning Spanish is that I’ve spent only a matter of weeks in Spanish-speaking countries in my life. Can you say the same about the amount of time you’ve spent in front of a computer? Most of us now spend our entire work days, and in many cases also a lot of our free time, interacting with a computer in one way or another.

Maybe learning the computer’s language will turn out to be worth your while if you’re in that situation, even if we never reach the point where young kids learn the “3 Rs and 1 P” in primary school.

Commenting fixed

As has become customary, when I changed the blog’s theme I also managed to break commenting for anyone not logged in (i.e., anyone other than me). ‘Tis fixed now.

Just a Coke please

Another year, another attempt to reinvigorate my blogging.

Even by my standards I’ve managed to produce an impressively long list of resolutions for this year. I know this is against the best advice of those who study the factors that allow us to keep our resolutions. But this time around I’ve decided to try to give myself the best chance of succeeding by just making so many resolutions that I’m bound to live up to one of them, if only by accident. There’s also the significant factor that I’ve had quite a bit of time off this last week, and so I’ve had all the time in the world to think of things it would be nice to try to do in 2012.

Besides, a half hour into the year it’s going quite well so far, so I may as well be optimistic about the rest of it.

A resolution that I expect to be among the most interesting to try to keep is one that I actually started on during 2011. It is to create a shorter-term resolution for each of the 12 months of the year. This is a slight variation on Matt Cutts’s 30-day challenges. I’ve changed it from 30-day periods to using calendar months mostly so that I can do something a little more daunting in February and only have to keep it up for 29 days (the leap year has unfortunately halved the effectiveness of this scheme).

But that’s a month away. I’d be getting ahead of myself if I revealed already what I hope to do then.

January, on the other hand, is literally on top of us. This month’s challenge is an echo of one I completed in June last year. Back then I went 30 days without caffeine. This time around it’s going to be alcohol. I expect to face a bit of skepticism when telling people about this endeavor. Most of my friends will be familiar with my claims of “giving up alcohol”, a phenomenon that seems to correlate strongly with late nights out and mysterious morning illnesses. So it’s worth pointing out two important facts: correlation does not imply causation; and I made the decision to cut out alcohol this month in state of complete sobriety and un-hungover-ness.

I put my celebratory wine glass down as the clock ticked towards 00:00, and I won’t be picking it back up until February.

Engaged

I’m getting married. So, there’s that.

Usernames that were already taken when I tried to register on Reddit

• OutOfMyElement
• ObviouslyNotAGolfer
• UrbanAchiever
• BrotherSeamus

Being Wrong

I enjoyed this paragraph from Tim Harford’s Financial Times piece on the reasons for, and consequences of, politicians’ love of certitude:

It is not clear why we enjoy certitude so much – certitude being the subjective experience of feeling certain. In contrast – as Kathryn Schulz observes in her wonderful book Being Wrong – there is simply no psychological experience of “being wrong” at all, only the lurching realisation of having been wrong until a moment ago.

I’ve never been a huge fan of being wrong. Now I can claim that I’ve never experienced it.

Finally

I’ve finally found a way to make England habitable.

I’ve always been bewildered yet faintly impressed that the rest of the world can survive with Fanta as its primary, and often only, carbonated fruit drink. I don’t think I need to point out to people who have tasted it that Fanta is the juice of Nazis.