i love my job. Don't get me wrong, things are often frustrating, and there are times i'd be quite happy to tell my co-workers to chuck it and walk away from my place of employment, but the actual art and science of what i do for a living is by far the most enjoyable way i can think of spending my time.
i get up, do some work, drive in, do work, eat lunch, work, eat dinner, work a bit more, go to sleep, and am damn happy. When the reaper comes a'callin' i fully expect to be one of those folks who will say "i really wish i could spend more time coding." i love what i do.
So it was with more than a bit of horror that i read Gordon's entry about how busy dinner is at Google.
From anecdotal accounts i’ve received, it is not just that Googlers eat, then leave for home. Frequently, they’re eating as a short respite from a long workday, and go back to work, sometimes after meeting with family for dinner.
As much as i love what i do, i know damn well that there's other responsibilities in my life. My employer has a contract on 40 hours of my time, 50 weeks out of the year, the remaining 4,240 hours of the year are mine. i may donate them to my employer (if i wish, and i often do) and do extra employment related work. i may also use portions of that time for things like sleeping, doing laundry, working on side projects, or painting my living room. The decision is mine alone to make, and the sure fire way to ensure that my employer only gets 40×50 hours out of me (rather than the usual 16×51) is to require me to spend "extra time" working on things "after hours". My last employer tried to pull that by mandating overtime. i adjusted by coming in later that i told him since he didn't come in until hours after i did.
My family are not my slaves. My wife is not my hired help whom i visit for eight hours on weekends to assess how well she's preforming. She's my best friend and i look forward to spending time with her. Thus the reason i married her. i grew up in a family with a working Dad i never really saw much of and i can tell you that it's not fun. i seek balance.
By building a culture such as what seems to be going on at Google, there is no balance. It's all about working for them. One assumes that the old Marine Corps "joke" could be tweaked a bit to say "If you were meant to have a spouse, Google would have issued you one" could easily apply. Sure, you could go home at night, maybe watch your kids baseball game on weekends, or attend a friends birthday, but while you're not there, Bob is and is being far more productive because he's there. Ok, he's recoding a lot because he's making mistakes, but he's right there, working away.
What? Work from home? Bob's not working from home and neither is that SVP Joe who walks by your cube every day, slacker. Hey, a bunch of us are getting together tomorrow at 9 to go over the Prometheus redesign. What? No, PM. We have that standup at 9AM, remember?
Every now and then folks ask if i've ever been approached to work at Google. i'm always honest with them. "Yep. Multiple times." And then i tell them i'd never go work for Google.
There are other reasons, but seeing stuff like this just kinda drives the point home for me.
I dunno. I've done my share of 72 hour days, and still don't mind doing them from time to time. I've always just had a problem with the built in expectation that I'm going to be doing that, and I think that's my problem with what I'm seeing at Google.
Honestly, if you're motivated and interested in staying late, damn dude, do it! More power to ya, and there's free M&Ms at my desk. Me? I like working late at home so I can stumble into bed when I want to. Always have. As comfy as those chairs are at work, a big padded slab beats it 10:1.
The problem is that over there, a culture is developing where folks are feeling pressured to "put in the hours on campus" and that's what I don't think is horribly healthy. Frankly, it's one of the reasons i'm happy we DON'T offer full dinners at work.
Nobody I know of says "So after pounding away for hours at a problem, I was there pounding away at the same problem when a flash of insight struck…" those sorts of things always happen in showers, or at the breakfast table, or on the drive to/from work when you're NOT thinking about the problem.
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When I started at Yahoo many many moons ago, I worked all the time. Literally all the time. There were tons of others just like me doing the exact same thing. It was fun. We would go on Taco Bell runs at 10 o'clock with Filo. It was amazing to me that I would be eating fast food with the founder of a multi-billion dollar company and he seemed just like me. If you wanted to play foos at midnight, there might be a line.
Years past and the company changed. So did I. I got married, had several kids, bought a house, got a dog. I am living the suburban american dream.
With all that added responsibility, my time commitment to the company changed. Most of my friends (like you JR) were off doing other things or at other companies (or retired!) so the motivation to stay and work all night was gone.
Instead, I chose to get there early and leave at a reasonable hour. Instead of 10-10 or 9-midnight, I now work 6am-4pm or so. I check emails at home at night and on weekends. I still work a boatload relative to the rest of the company.
I think the work crazy hours is a thing of being young and not having a whole lot else to do. If I were 25 and working at Google, I would be there all night. It is probably a blast, just like Yahoo! 8 years ago.