14 DAY TRIAL // There's a trend when talking about Google as an employer. It's the best company in the world to work for, according to a research on 100,000 or so employees from different companies that Forbes conducted, it's got a beautiful atmosphere and great cafeterias, huge opportunities to go after the side projects of choice and so on and yadda-yadda.
While there won't be anybody from the Mountain View-based company to come up front, grab a mike at a press conference and say something like "?and to those blowing smoke up Google's arse, I just want to say that they cannot be more wring. They could try but they would not succeed," it's pretty difficult for the employees there to see a distorted image of the company they work for, being posted all over the media.
It's getting really old to keep hearing periodically about the same aspects over and over again, and it's not just those paying close attention. Ex-Googler Kevion Scott ranted on the subject: "Google is undoubtedly an awesome company and was certainly a great place to work the entire time I was there. But. These unreservedly positive fluff pieces really aren't doing the company a service. They irritated me when I was an employee given the too-perfect pictures they painted and what they missed. For instance, ideas at Google do not burst forth from the heads of geniuses and then find their way unimpeded to huge audiences of receptive users. Rather ideas emerge, are torn to shreds, reformulated, torn to shreds, prototyped, torn to shreds, launched to internal users, torn to shreds, rebuilt and relaunched, torn to shreds, refined some more, torn to shreds, put back together one last time, torn to shreds by [site reliability engineers], tweaked again in a seemingly-endless frenzy of last minute work, and launched ... whereupon they are torn to shreds by bloggers, journalists, and competitors. The magic of Google is that tearing to shreds, even when founders are shredding, doesn't often mean outright project cancellation."
There! Google isn't filled with geniuses that have a streak of brilliant ideas, it's closer, if I may, to a communist party meeting, where everyone is compelled to auto-critique his work and then have it lay bare-chested on the operation table of the other members. Not that it's a bad thing, after all, that's how good ideas turn into perfect features and products.