Category: Tech

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.

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.

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.