Numeric Jungle

How Google Works

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  • A book about Google culture, management, and the authors’ success stories.

  • Find people with passion
    • What are trends you missed/ predicted correctly in the 2000s?
    • What’s the biggest failure in your career?
    • How do you pitch your work to your CEO?
    • Page asked “Tell me something interesting I don’t know” when interviewing Jonathan.
  • Hiring culture
    • A committee vote to decide who to hire - mimic from the academic
    • A false negative is better than a false positive.
    • Huge Bonus for people do great works
  • Don’t do evil
    • When they found Google was attacked by Chinese hackers, and many dissidents’ Gmail accounts were almost being hacked; after careful investigations, a committee decided to move their business out from China in order to keep servers safe.
  • Meeting
    • Every meeting must have an organizer, make sure participants understand the goals
    • Participants should not do their personal items during the meeting
    • Data-driven decisions: presenters prepare up-to-date data, charts, numbers to support their claims
    • Within 2 days after the meeting, the organizer should share a summary report to all participants
    • For those who just came back from business trip or vacation, give a few minutes trip highlight first, it’s usually fun and inspiring. One colleague actually chatted with several cell phone dealers and heard their feedback about Android when it was just launched.
  • Email
    • Only send to relevant people, not every email goes to group alias
    • First come, last read - older requests may be resolved already
  • Culture
    • Prove with data
    • Quick iterations, create a feedback loop to fast prototyping, rollout, get feedback and improve.
    • Openness and Transparency
      • Google shares as more as possible both inside and outside the company
      • Every Google employee can submit questions anonymously to CEO, CEO will answer popular questions weekly.
    • Encourage competitions
      • A strong competitor like Bing is favored than no competitor in the market
      • Make users easy to pack their data and leave Google services, therefore, Google needs to work harder to keep them