In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

by Steven Levy

The APM program, I learned, was a highly valued initiative. To quote the pitch one of the participants made in 2006 to recent and upcoming college graduates: “We invest more into our APMs than any other company has ever invested into young employees…. We envision a world where everyone is awed by the fact that Google’s executives, the best CEOs in the Silicon Valley, and the most respected leaders of global non-profits all came through the Google APM program.” Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, told me, “One of these people will probably be our CEO one day—we just don’t know which one.”

Page and Brin both held a core belief that the success of their company would hinge on having world-class engineers and scientists committed to their ambitious vision. Page believed that technology companies can thrive only by “an understanding of engineering at the highest level.”

Discipline must come through liberty…. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself.”

It was where the engineers were, and they were royalty at Google. Those who had gotten jobs at Google without computer science degrees—the people churning out tasks such as communications, billing, human resources, and even building facilities administration—weren’t exactly second-class citizens, but definitely a lower class of citizens. “There is an absolutely crystal-clear hierarchy at Google,” says Denise Griffin, who was hired at Google for a nontechnical job in 2000. “It’s engineers and everyone else.

Spurred by Page’s ambition, Ghemawat and Jeff Dean came up with a dramatic improvement in handling massive amounts of information spread over multiple data centers. It split tasks among machines in a faster manner, in the same way a programmer performing an operation on large collections of data can spread the work over many computers without worrying about how to apportion the work. The program worked in two steps—first by mapping the system (figuring out how the information was spread out and duplicated in various locations—basically an indexing process) and then by reducing the information to the transformed data requested.

Rubin, who was a maniacal robot aficionado—he would haunt the Akihabara district of Tokyo for weird Japanese toys, and build a few of his own—called the company Android. He gathered a team of eight to begin working on a prototype. He had a good contact at the handset manufacturer HTC, which provided him with a top-secret new device that he could use just for demos. After a few months, Android had a working model with a set of slick features such as contacts, email, and a camera. (One nice touch was that Android’s photo software could recognize faces.)

He would later vividly recall the trip he had made to Korea—“on my own dime!” he said—to present the concept to Samsung. He and two colleagues found themselves in a huge boardroom. Standing along the wall were about twenty carefully manicured executives in blue suits. (Rubin was in blue jeans.) The division head arrived, and, as if on cue, everyone sat down. Rubin gave his presentation, and the division head rocked with laughter. “You have eight people in your company,” said this executive. “And I have two thousand people working on something that’s not as ambitious.” It wasn’t a compliment.

Video team had spent an enormous amount of time getting approval and advice from executives. Also, Google Video—whose product manager was herself a lawyer—was constrained by oversight by a legal team all too aware that a deep-pocketed public company could not behave with the insouciance of a start-up. The YouTube team, however, didn’t have to create multiple drafts of slide shows for bosses. They did what felt right. “It’s all ’bout da videos, yo,” wrote Karim at one point to his cofounders. But after the purchase, Google did something very smart. Almost as if acknowledging that overattention from the top had hobbled Google’s original video effort, the company made a conscious decision not to integrate YouTube. “They were edgy and small, and we were getting big,” says Drummond. “We didn’t want to screw them up.”

One of the big ideas of Google was that if you gave engineers the freedom to dream big and the power to do it—if you built the whole operation around their mind-set and made it clear that they were in charge—the impossible could be accomplished. But in the government, even though Stanton’s job was to build new technologies and programs, “I didn’t meet one engineer,” she says. “Not one software engineer who works for the United States government. I’m sure they exist, but I haven’t met any. At Google I worked with people far smarter and creative than me, and they were engineers, and they always made everyone else look good. They’re doers.