Google's a Great Place to Work and Where You Work Sucks
Google is where every technology professional wants to work. The great benefits come from a business model driven by ad revenue that just keeps coming regardless of how and where the company spends money. However, the bad news is two-fold, writes Rob Enderle: Your employer will never be in this position and Google won't be in it forever.
Tue, January 24, 2012
CIO — I came to the Silicon Valley to work for a company in the mid-1980s that was then where Google is now in terms of offering unrivaled benefits. ROLM Telecom, a new telecom company, had a department called "The Great Place to Work" department and the firm was top ranked as the best place to work in the country.
That's why I went to work for it. My goal was to find a way to eventually run that department, but IBM bought ROLM and before I could even get into the department, it was eliminated under the rationale that it was every manager's job to make the company a great place to work. The move ended up proving the point that if a job is "everyone's" then no one actually focuses on it. Under IBM's watch ROLM went from being a company trying to get to $1 billion in annual revenue to a company that was trying to keep from going under. ROLM no longer exists, which showcases how that turned out.
Today Google is where everyone wants to work. There is a reason why Google can offer its employees benefits that other companies can't. However, there are some massive hazards to the path that Google is on, which I believe can be avoided but I doubt will be given the nature of the U.S. market drivers. Google will be unable to maintain its employee benefits indefinitely based on my unfortunate ROLM experience.
At the Core of Google's Nirvana
At the core of Google's capability to provide a fabulous place to work is a revenue model that is like a money hose. It makes a portion of the revenue generated by most ad placements. These placements occur regardless of much of what Google actually does. Few ads are consumed on phones, few ads are consumed on Google +, and few ads are consumed in Google Apps. If all of these failed tomorrow and Google shut them down, its revenue would likely stay relatively flat and its costs would appear to drop.
The company reminds me of a story about a kid we employed at ROLM who had a massive trust fund. The first time we sent him to New York he stayed in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel and submitted an expense report that brought tears, and not in a good way, to the eyes of our CFO. His rationale was this was that he had always stayed at this hotel and after being told we couldn't afford such rich tastes he continued to say at the Waldorf in a suite, but rented a second cheap room that he could expense and paid for the expensive room from his trust fund. Most of us couldn't afford to do that, but because his income was largely decoupled from his job, he could live like a king and do pretty much anything he wanted.
