They're Number One!

You can google this to prove it for yourself, but Fortune has chosen Google as its number one company in this year's Top 100 places to work. The article on Google by Adam Lashinsky is a must read in full. What follows are good bits but, I assure you, the entire article is a good byte.

First there's the mouth-watering food available at the 11 gourmet cafeterias:

Joshua Bloch, an expert on the Java software language, swears by the roast quail at haute eatery Café Seven, professing it to be the best meal on campus. "It's uniformly excellent," he raves.

I found that to be a gross distortion of the facts. The roasted black bass with parsley pesto and bread crumbs had a delicate flavor, superior mouth feel, and a light yet satisfying finish that seemed to me unmatched.

Of course, when it comes to America's new Best Company to Work For, the food is, well, just the appetizer. At Google you can do your laundry; drop off your dry cleaning; get an oil change, then have your car washed; work out in the gym; attend subsidized exercise classes; get a massage; study Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, and French; and ask a personal concierge to arrange dinner reservations. Naturally you can get haircuts onsite. Want to buy a hybrid car? The company will give you $5,000 toward that environmentally friendly end. Care to refer a friend to work at Google? Google would like that too, and it'll give you a $2,000 reward. Just have a new baby? Congratulations! Your employer will reimburse you for up to $500 in takeout food to ease your first four weeks at home. Looking to make new friends? Attend a weekly TGIF party, where there's usually a band playing. Five onsite doctors are available to give you a checkup, free of charge.

Then there's the Wi-Fi enabled commuter buses. The lectures by Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher. The breast pumps in the lactation centers so that nursing moms won't have to lug their own in. Heated toilet seats. Pajama day. (Hey, my niece has that at her camp. It sounds like fun for the kids, but would I really want to show up at work in a Lanz nightgown and LL Bean robe?)

Of course, you have to take the good with the bad, and Lashinsky found that the "employees can and do cite [the mission statement] with cloying frequency." (For the record, the mission statement calls for Google "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

There's also a hilarious part of Lashinsky's article in which he talks about flyers in the heated toilet stalls that encouraged quality assurance engineers to think about novel ways of testing code. Let's not waste a moment reading the sports section or just staring of into space. (They probably have the same type of flyers in the lactations centers, too.)

Even if you take away all the stuffed quails and heated toilet seats, there are some fundamentals that it sounds like Google does ultra-well with. Dedication. Team work. Creativity.

All Google engineers are famously required to devote 20% of their time to pursuing projects they dream up that will help the company. The projects actually have a realistic chance of being adopted too. Google News, Gmail, and the Google Finance site all sprouted from 20% time.

Who wouldn't want to work there? It sounds like the world's most fun, brainiest, creative, coolest, most energized environment. I'm no longer at a point in my life when I want to "live at work," but at one point this would have been nearly 100% appealing.

Apparently the current students at my Sloan School at MIT (where I got my business degree) fell the same way. Here's Maura Welch on the Boston Filter blogging on an article that appeared in Fortune.

If a recent trip to Silicon Valley by 85 students from MIT’s Sloan School of Management is any indication, the valley is awash with economic health. Students "enjoyed a whirlwind of introductions and sneak peeks. They talked with executives of fledgling start-ups and toured companies with market caps in the billions. They chatted with venture capitalists. And of course, they lunched at Google." While start-ups are also a big draw, 42 percent of the Sloan students were hot on summer internship prospects at Google and 26 percent would consider a full-time job at the Googleplex.

(In my day, everyone wanted to work at Bain, Booz, McKinsey or an investment bank. That is, everyone other than me. I wanted to work at a off-kilter software company in Harvard Square. Be careful what you wish for.)

If Google had been an option, the only things that give me pause are the motivational flyers in the toilets and all that "cloying" recitation of the mission statement. That all sounds a bit Mao-ist to me. But in exchange for having been able to retire at 32? I could have sucked it up and parroted all the sayings in The Little Google Book on demand.

On a more cautionary note, Lashinsky writes:

It's easy for Google's people to be energized, though, when their company is so stinking rich that it continues to ooze cash even while lavishing benefits on its staff. Just eight years out of the garage, Google will surpass $10 billion in sales for 2006. Its operating margins are a stunning 35%, and it ended the third quarter with $10.4 billion in cash. Its stock has soared from $85 a little over two years ago to a recent $483. All of which raises the question: Is Google's culture the cause of its success or merely a result? Put another way: Is Google a great place to work because its stock is at $483, or is its stock at $483 because it's a great place to work?...

So back to that $483 question: Is Google's culture great because its stock is doing well, or is its stock doing well because its culture is great? The answer, of course, is that you can't answer the question when Google's stock is at $483. Like Genentech [which Google cites as a role-model for keeping the culture alive as a company "ages] or any other company that's been through the wringer without losing the loyalty of its staff, you can gauge the impact the stock price has on the culture only once the stock takes a dive - or stalls for an uncomfortably long time (see Microsoft, 2001--06).

If and when the next best tech thing happens in Silicon Valley, or Austin, or SoHo, or Cambridge, or Research Triangle - and someday, it no doubt will... If and when the market decides that the company's on thin ice....If and when rifts develop between the got-rich-quick early employees and the got-not-so-rich-not-so-quick later employees...If and when the company gets so large that some of the perks, creativity, and teamwork become impractical...If and when the sheer amount of not-so-cool work - product maintenance, customer support, etc. means that the employee base starts including a larger complement of "normal" folks, and not just geniuses. If and when, for the latter day option holders, their paper millions shrink into real thousands...It will be interesting to see if Google will still be the techie paradise it sounds like now.

(Thanks to Inside the Cubicle for his post on this subject. I may have missed this year's Best Places to Work edition of Fortune if not for Jeffrey Treem.)