November 6, 2013
Cowprint rugs, beanbags, snooker tables, tax mitigation. Life at Google sure is sweet. Ronan Lynch says otherwise as he dives behind the Doodles to find out why not all Googlers are feeling lucky.
For all its oft-touted motto ‘Don’t be evil’, Google Inc is a world-striding multinational corporation, and few people expect the company to behave like a charity. Still, Google is probably unhappy about all the recent publicity about their expert tax avoidance and being caught up – however unwillingly – in the NSA’s worldwide spying programme. So it’s a bright point for Google that its reputation as a fantastic place to work has entered into popular culture and corporate lore.Take the summer comedy The Internship, where two forty-something unemployed salesmen get taken on as interns by Google and go to work at offices that look like an amusement park. Or check out George Lee’s recent RTE news report from Google’s Irish headquarters on Barrow Street in Dublin, where George can’t help but marvel at his surroundings on the eleventh floor. There’s “pretty funky sleeping pods, cowprint rugs, beanbags and snooker tables and a whole lot more,” he says. “It really is some workplace.”....MUCH MORE
Pretty smooth eh?
The reason for this sojourn back in time is in one of the later paragraphs:
...THE BEST MINDS OF MY GENERATION
A classic quote about high tech companies came from Cloudera founder Jeff Hammerbacher when he left Facebook. Channeling Allen Ginsberg, Hammerbacher observed that ‘The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads’. At the Dublin headquarters, Google’s employees learn how to use internal software systems, and then start working on dealing with incoming emails and checking ads to see if they meet internal guidelines. They also work on copywriting and editing. It’s one of the reasons that employees eventually move on if they can’t move up. “The reality is that you are bringing in people who are highly educated to Masters level and giving them entry level customer service jobs,” says the former employee....
It's that "best minds of my generation" line. Readers who have been with us for a while (or who have an independent interest in 1950's Beat poetry) will recognize it as the beginning of Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl':
We've used it a few times, here's July 2011I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...
Europe: "Angel-headed Hipsters Burning for the Ancient Heavenly Connection to the Starry Dynamo in the Machinery of Night"
