The generous explanation for Schmidt's statement is that he's revolutionized his thinking since 2005, when he blacklisted CNET for publishing info about him gleaned from Google searches, including salary, neighborhood, hobbies and political donations. In that case, the married CEO must not mind all the coverage of his various reputed girlfriends; it's odd he doesn't clarify what's going on with the widely-rumored extramarital dalliances, though.

Schmidt's philosophy is clear with Bartiromo in the clip below: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding. Convenient, that is, as long as people are smart enough not to apply the "secrets suck" philosophy to their Google passwords , credit card numbers and various other secrets they need to put money in Google's pockets.

It's enough to make one pine for the more innocent Google bursting forth in the c. 1999 group picture at the top of this post, also gleaned from CNBC's special. The hair might have been sillier — dig co-founder Sergey Brin and VP Marissa Mayers' cuts, top center — but no one was yet audacious enough to argue against the very idea of a secret.

That's according to Peter Norvig (pictured), Google's director of research, former Google director of search quality and former head of the Computational Sciences division at the NASA Ames research center. Here's what Norvig tells Peter Seibel in a Q&A in the new book Coders at Work (emphasis added):

One of the interesting things we've found, when trying to predict how well somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success.

Small suggestion: Maybe Google can take these genius employees and have them, hmmm, we dunno, debug the frickin' broken interview process. Those who demanded they be hired should probably also be enlisted in the debugging effort. Writes Norvig:

Ninety-nine percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we didn't hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table and said, "I have to hire this person because I see something in him..."

Unfortunately, Google's had already done most of its hiring/rejecting and is now has been in layoff mode for much of this year. But, hey, there's always the next bubble.

UPDATE: A Goolge spokesperson disputed that the company was "in layoff mode," as we wrote, and stated: "To the contrary, we have been very explicit... that we are stepping our rate of hiring." Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt stated in a discussion of Q3 results that "we're going to invest in people. We're already stepping up our hiring." That's in contrast to earlier this year, when Google had three rounds of layoffs from January through the end of March.

UPDATE 2: Norvig writes on his FriendFeed that we got "everything wrong" — this is just more evidence of how well the Google process works. Click through to read his full post (and our reply, underneath).

(Pic: Norvig, by Mathieu Thouvenin)

Speaking to reporters today in New York, founder Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt (pictured) said people shouldn't come to the company to get rich, and shouldn't expect fancy food, Peter Kafka at All Things D reports.

Brin:

There was a period of time where the [Google] culture, as it were, was misinterpreted... When there were a few of us working in the garage... occasionally [cofounder] Larry [Page] would Rollerblade in with a few sandwiches for food. And that grew up into everybody's expectation: "Oh, they should have all the gourmet food they want, at any time." ...We decided to... significantly cut down all the snacks that had been available.

Schmidt:

Google pays very well. Google is clearly a growth company... We don't want them to come to Google for those reasons. We want them to come to Google to change the world...



....The tightening that [CFO] Patrick [Pichette] in particular did, who I think is the current Google hero, really did change the culture in a much more pragmatic way: "We're happy to work here. We're happy to be employed. We love what we're doing. Our friends, you know, have been laid off."

So, to summarize, a CEO who is a multibillionaire due to his Google stock says that you shouldn't come to the company to get rich, but to change the world. And the co-founder who has got Google investing in and renting space to his wife's company and hiring his mother in law as a consultant says Google shouldn't breed a culture of entitlement. OK.

But that puts to lie Google's old line, which was that it made crucial productivity gains by keeping programmers in the office longer with perks like free haircuts, a climbing wall, free internet-enabled buses, and, yes, free gourmet food. Here's what Brin and co-founder Larry Page wrote in an open letter to investors ahead of Google's 2004 IPO:

We provide many unusual benefits for our employees, including meals free of charge, doctors and washing machines. We are careful to consider the long term advantages to the company of these benefits. Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity.

Brin also defended the perks in a 2001 New York Times article, saying that, compared to routine corporate costs like marketing campaigns, ''these things cost nothing." Apparently "nothing" really adds up.

Preeti Mistry was eliminated from the Top Chef competition on Bravo last night after serving pasta salad. The cafeteria chef should blame her Google bosses for turning her repertoire so pedestrian with their cost-cutting. An Army marches on its stomach; Google is obviously doomed. Via Peter Kafka at AllThingsD.

The upshot of this unfortunate decision — clams are nothing like oysters — was something of a "500 Server Error" for her reality-show team. They weren't "feeling lucky," if you know what we mean.

Mistry, the short-haired, fauxhawked cook in the above video except, is back at Google's "Charlie's Cafe" at the Mountain View headquarters, Peter Kafka reports in All Things D. Reps for Google's catering firm tell Kafka she's "recovering" from the rattling Top Chef taping. But for all its recent cutbacks, including on food, the last thing Google needs is a public rebuke to its much-vaunted culinary excellence. Might we suggest a grudge match involving another tech company, say, Facebook? They've totally got a cafeteria!

UPDATE: As NBC Bay Area notes, Mistry's been hamming it up on her Twitter feed. Or "clamming" it up, rather:

(Clip via Hulu)

Here are some of the quotes rounded up by the Wall Street Journal:

• "Like 15,000 college kids having a gigantic frat party." —Palo Alto marketer.
  
• "Just the marquee event of the summer." —Google Dance regular.
  
• "People are upset... it could've been a good morale booster." —Social media consultant.

Google has greatly slowed its hiring and tightened its focus on the bottom line; as its workforce matured both emotionally and in raw median age, it was inevitable the company's giant frat party would go the way of the big Disneyland trip. Hopefully, for employees' sake, Google is still willing to direct some profits toward more tasteful methods of giving away booze and snacks.

According to an SEC filing, Google put an additional $2.6 million into 23andMe, following up a $3.9 million investment in 2007. And Google, which has been laying off workers, is renting space to Wojcicki's firm. On what terms? No one outside Google knows, except for one appraiser whose opinion is unclear. From the SEC filing:

In June 2009, Google also entered into a lease agreement with 23andMe... The terms and conditions of the lease with 23andMe were reviewed by an independent real estate appraiser.

It's not clear whether Wojcicki, who recently gave birth to son Benji, will work from the new digs, but the proximity to Brin — and to Google's free child care — would certainly help her keep child-rearing and a high-powered career in easier balance. Whether the deal is as good for Google shareholders remains unclear.

At least Swisher had the good taste to go after one of her News Corp. colleagues, too, calling MySpace chief (and former Facebook COO) Owen Van Natta a girly penman. On tour with Facebook PR chief Brandee Barker, Swisher also threw in some self-deprecation that doubled as disclosure: thanks to a spouse who works at Google, Swisher dines freely on the search giants vaunted food, making the All Things D editor especially well-positioned to judge Facebook's cafeteria food against the competition.

It also makes her ideally suited to poke fun at Facebook for trying to stay cool despite its move from downtown Palo Alto to a fuddy-duddy old HP office park in the suburbs.

Facebook ought to invite Swisher back for a proper lunch review, if only to clear the name of its poor chef.

Quick highlights reel above; full eight-minute tour below.

[All Things D via Business Insider]

At least, that's the impression Googler Steve Yegge left when describing still-cushy working conditions at the search giant. The former Amazon.com coder is based at Google's Kirkland, Washington campus, home to any number of refugees from the online bookstore and from Microsoft, right next door in Redmond.

There, the Googlers complained about the particulars of the free sweets, a sort of brazen entitlement that Yegge conceded, in an interview with ex-Microsoftie Joel Spolsky and software entrepreneur Jeff Atwood, was "kind of an issue."

At its Mountain View headquarters, Googlers now deal with those sorts of problems ruthlessly, using the tried and true tactic of public shame: A staffer who recently griped in an all-hands meeting about the dwindling supply of free food was booed in front of — and by — his coworkers (Yegge sets the scene in the attached clip).

Thanks to the recession, Google can dispense this sort of tough love to staff and still attract plenty of fresh talent, stock performance be damned. For that much it can be grateful. But Googlers should be careful who they jeer. The cream of the company will always have the chance to jump to sexier competitors.

(Clip via Stack Overflow podcast)

"People are talking about some senior level offsites happening this weekend to discuss an upcoming round of major layoffs," our source tells us. Googlers have been expecting substantial job cuts for some time, beyond the hundreds of recruiters, marketers, and salespeople laid off earlier this year.

One reason for a sudden, panicked push to slash jobs: Google CEO Eric Schmidt spent most of last fall blithely ignoring the economic carnage. When Google started to feel an impact, it tried to limit cuts to its vast ranks of contractors. (Google has never confirmed the numbers, but some in the Valley believe it fired as many as 10,000 contract workers.)

The company still has 20,000-plus employees, and continues to hire, even though Wall Street analysts think the company could carry on without a hiccup at half that size. The question is when Google's engineers, a powerful clan which effectively rules the company, will start feeling management's knives.

Google doesn't have its own corporate jets — good thing, since that transportation perk is so déclassé these days. Instead, the company leases planes, including a set of jets jointly owned by Schmidt and Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Peter Kafka at MediaMemo notes that Google paid for $106,201 worth of travel to have Schmidt's "family and friends" accompany him on business trips.

Which made us think: What happened in Schmidt's life last year? Schmidt, who is married, has had a series of girlfriends on the side. (Good for him!) But he started getting serious with his most recent one, Kate Bohner, in late 2007. Bohner, who was briefly married to author Michael Lewis and is said to have inspired the character of sex-crazed Samantha on Sex and the City, lived in south Florida until she relocated to Los Angeles last fall. During the presidential campaign, she was spotted escorting Schmidt to at least one YouTube-sponsored debate.

I asked a Google spokesman if Bohner was one of Schmidt's passengers, but he declined to comment. So did Bohner fly free on the Google party plane? If so, good for Schmidt: Not every executive, in this perk-hostile times, gets to fly such friendly skies.

In an epic 7,738-word interview, the CBS newswoman probes Mayer on privacy, womanhood, fashion, and cupcakes. She even cites Valleywag! (We would love to have been a fly on the wall and seen Mayer's expression when Stahl uttered the gossip blog's name.)

Stahl, otherwise a close study of Valleywag's reporting on Mayer, mistakenly promotes Mayer to "queen of cupcakes." Mayer, who gushed to San Francisco about how vanilla frosting gave her "brain euphoria," had previously denied having any business interest whatsoever in cupcakes.

But, in what looks like a desperate attempt to make herself look more serious for Stahl, Mayer appears to make up a crazy-sounding story about how her enthusiasm for cupcakes was really just an exercise in exploring it as a business idea. And then, when Stahl asks her if she's going to quit Google to become a cupcakepreneur, Mayer hastily denies it:

LESLEY: Yes. Good analogy. To me, Marissa, you are a really, really interesting person because I think your interests are diverse and unexpected. Let me say that. A surprise. And I guess what I'm specifically talking about now is cupcakes, Marissa. You're the queen of cupcakes. What is that? Tell me what that is. Every time I read anything about you, the cupcakes come up.

MARISSA: I don't think I'm the queen of cupcakes.

LESLEY: No?
MARISSA: I do have a legendary sweet tooth. But I think that, you know, one of the key things I think about here at Google is consumers – what they're interested in, what's a fad right now, what's a basic need. One observation I made a few years ago, just from a business perspective, is that I think the same way we saw the rise of the Krispy Kreme donut, people see the rise of the cupcakes. For example, Crumbs is now franchising. Someone's going to take cupcakes and they're going to figure out how to bake them in Subway-like ovens and frost them up right in front of you and franchise it. Because I think that, especially now because of the economic downturn, cupcakes are simple, they are comforting, they're inexpensive.

LESLEY: They're fattening.

MARISSA: And they can scale. But they're interesting from a business perspective. It's a prediction that I made around the next fad. I do have a sweet tooth. I do like to bake. I have my various spreadsheets analyzing different recipes and looking at the differences between them.

...

LESLEY: You know, The New York Times [actually, Valleywag -Ed.] recently created somewhat of a mini-storm by suggesting that you were thinking of leaving Google. And your job at Google is to think about what's next for Google. Are you beginning to think about what's next for Marissa?

MARISSA: I'm very challenged at Google. I'm very happy at Google. I don't understand where the rumor came from. It really was baseless. I couldn't be happier with my role here, our progress at Google, or my team.

LESLEY: In other words – let's get it on the record at wowOwow.com: You are not about to open Marissa's Cupcake Company?

MARISSA: No. Absolutely not.

But the best part is when the ladyreporter and the ladyexecutive start talking ladyfashion:

LESLEY: OK, so you're a geek, right? That's what you said.

MARISSA: Yes.

LESLEY: But, you know, geeks don't wear clothes that match, as somebody said.

MARISSA: Who makes that rule?

LESLEY: Well you just have to observe -

MARISSA: To me a geek is one who is really enthusiastic about technology, likes to hack on things and we have a lot of attention to detail. Why shouldn't our clothes match?

We could think of many words to describe Mayer's unique, Skittles-inspired fashion sense. But never would it occur to us to use the word "match" in explicating her nouveau gauche way with clothing. Look for yourselves, and discuss how best to summarize Mayer's matchless taste:

And let's not forget her sporty look.

(Photos via El Pais, Trends der Zukunft, CNET News, Sydney Morning Herald/Brendan Esposito, New York Social Diary, Wall Street Journal, Beet.tv, San Francisco Magazine, Rafael Mizrahi, Keso via Blogoscoped, SFLuxe,

More than anyone, Google popularized the notion that free websites could be supported by advertising, touching off the insane Web 2.0 boom that led self-promoting social media marketers to overrun San Francisco and drove venture capitalists into fits of expensive madness. If Google could give away its Web searches, why couldn't, say, Ploorkle monetize its users' ploonks?

Google didn't just serve as an example. It actively funded the free-everything boom with its AdSense ads, matching keyword buys from advertisers with every last blog and Web app.

The Google-spread delusion of "free" as the perfect price infected such lofty minds as Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired who penned first a cover story and now a book due out in July on the subject.

What does it mean for the freetards, then, that Google is starting to charge left and right?

The latest and most notable price hike came today on Google Checkout. The credit-card processing service for online merchants will soon match PayPal's fees, which run as high as 2.9 percent of a transaction.

When Checkout launched, it offered free processing for stores which spent heavily on Google ads, with the notion that free payments would lure vendors away from Amazon.com and eBay. Google is eliminating the AdWords discount, making Checkout just another PayPal clone.

Google has also raised prices on its once-free hosted computing services for startups which don't want to bother running their own servers.

The hikes have mostly hit Google's business customers. But how long before Google will raise prices for, say, extra Gmail storage? How long before it spackles ads on services previously kept pristine, as it's already done with Google News?

The advent of ads to Google News is notable. Just last summer, Google VP Marissa Mayer argued that Google News made $100 million a year from the Web search traffic the site generated, and therefore didn't need its own ads. Looks like she lost that battle with the green-eyeshades brigade. YouTube, too, is burying its videos in every imaginable form of advertising.

Google is widely expected to announce disastrously bad results for its first quarter. Industry trade groups have cut their forecasts for search advertising, Google's mainstay. Rumors of layoffs are sweeping Google's Mountain View campus. And even Google's Pollyanna CEO, Eric Schmidt, admits that the economic situation is dire.

Far more than a temporary belt-tightening, the cutbacks are a far-reaching change in mindset. It's no longer okay to invent something new and figure out how to pay for it later, as Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin once did. At today's Google, products must pay their own way, and with actual receipts, not business-model whiteboarding.

Who cares that that's not how Larry and Sergey did it? The billionaire founders are flying around the world somewhere on their private jets. The rest of Google has a business to run. And their paychecks don't come free.

A tipster reports:

I was waiting to get lunch at Cafe 5ive at Google (very popular now that it's closing) today and overheard an engineer: "Can you believe this? They make 50 highly paid engineers wait in line for one lowly paid chef."

Watch out, Google kids — that "lowly paid chef"'s name is Jean-Claude Balek, and he's one tough character. He has "foie gras" tattooed on his knuckles. He's staying with Google and moving to another café. And we would not blame him one bit if he slipped a surprise into your next organic suckling pig.

(Photo by Roshan V)

"That's business," said Balek when Valleywag reached him by phone.

The reason for the closure: Google is subleasing an entire complex of offices. It has already laid off thousands of contractors, so it no longer needs the space. How sudden is this move? Basic Deli, which won raves from San Francisco Chronicle food critic Michael Bauer, had only been open a year. 5ive, the cafe where Googlers are eating in the clip above, has also proved popular.

The company already closed Off the Grid, one of the complex's three cafés which offer free food for Google workers, last October. Plymouth and Oasis, two cafés on the edge of Google's main campus, may be next, a source says.

Balek, a colorful chef who has the words "foie gras" tattooed on his knuckles, confirmed his café's closure. He's moving to another café on the Googleplex, and says that all of the kitchen staff — contract workers employed by Bon Appétit — have been placed.

That will be news to them: We hear that none of the Basic staff have yet learned whether they'll have jobs on Monday. They were promised word two days ago.

"That's a vendor issue," Balek explained before hurrying back to his kitchen.

The chef is being highly diplomatic here. Google has long sparred with Bon Appétit, squeezing the café operator to keep dishing up organic expensive fare at rock-bottom prices. The result of the infighting: Steady cutbacks on meals and hours served, culminating in this weeks' outright closure of cafés. A scandal forced out John Dickman, head of Google's food operations. (He landed briefly at Apple afterwards, but reportedly left in January.) Googlers, meanwhile, have treated the company's cooks, servers and dishwashers with the kind of dismissive disdain they usually reserve for media executives.

Under a new, well-paid CFO, Google is focusing intensely on costs. Patrick Pichette, Google's penny-pincher in chief, is preserving Google's profit margins. But at what cost to the culture? Free food is the legendary perk around which Google has built its reputation for treating employees well. You can't cut your cake and have it, too.

For almost five years now, Google has a sprawling network of shuttles that ferry workers from San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area to their Mountain View, Calif. headquarters — thus sparing its employees the indignity of living in the dreary, decidedly unhip office park sprawl of Silicon Valley. Some 1,200 people ride the shuttles each day. After the company's famous free cafeterias, the shuttle is one of Google's most visible perks.

But it could be taken away so easily. Contractors pay $15 a week, and since Googlers have to swipe their ID cards to board the bus, it would be easy for the company to start charging employees and interns the same rate, or more. (A ride on public transportation costs about three times as much and takes nearly twice as long, because of Google's environmentally unfriendly location across a highway from local transit links.)

The buses have Wi-Fi and run on biodiesel, a less polluting alternative to regular gas. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have become environmental crusaders, spending shareholder money on renewable energy efforts, which might have some salutary impact on Google's electricity bills, but seem far afield from its core business of Web search.

A Google spokesman, asked for a statement, offered no comment on the record. It would strain credulity for Google to start charging. The cost-cutting symbolism would pale compared to the negative environmental impact of sending green-thinking Googlers back into their cars — not to mention the PR hit the company would take.

But it's notable that Googlers, who are generally smart and aware of the precarious state of the economy, are gossiping about the notion of losing such a beloved perk as their free ride to work. And it's telling, too, that Google wouldn't just come out and deny the rumor. That fact alone suggests it's in the realm of possibility.

(Photo by jyri)

Behind it: star-struck engineer Chade-Meng Tan, who's known for his disturbingly large collection of snapshots with the famous people who visit the Googleplex. Tan, a Buddhist, is shown here with Lama Surya Das, the "American Lama", explained the purpose at a recent conference, according to Soul's Code, a spirituality website:

Google wants to help Googlers grow as human beings on all levels. Emotional, mental, physical and ‘beyond the self’. (This) is why Google University instituted the School of Personal Growth, perhaps the first of its kind in a large corporation. We don’t just pamper Googlers, we want to help them fulfill their full human potential.

It was inevitable that northern California's most successful company would embrace the region's embarrassingly goofy human-potential movement. And timely, too, that Google management would try to get employees focused on their spiritual well-being, at a time when so many of the stock options lavished on engineers are worthless.

The risk for Google: that newly enlightened workers will realize that working at an overgrown advertising broker which peddles personal-injury lawyers and diet pills to Web searchers is not the ultimate route to spiritual advancement.

ChiChi212 attended one of the three, a party for engineers at Penthouse 15 on West 37th Street in midtown Manhattan. The scene: filet mignon, top-shelf liquor, and "tons of technies dancing to Soulja Boy," blogger Brittany Mendenhall writes. Another party is planned for engineers at the Westside Loft, and salespeople get a party at the Central Park Boathouse. Deborah Schoeneman estimated that this year's parties will cost half of 2007's bash at the Rainbow Room, which ran $300 a head.

The billions gushing in from Google's search monopoly don't make for a good story. Whenever Google's PR executives have looked to drum up press, they've led with the candy-colored offices, the free food, and the copious free time. All of those are now on the chopping block — which leaves not much to talk about at Google except the profits.

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at Google's new push for cost cuts. As others have reported, Google is curtailing service at its cafeterias, reducing hours and restricting guests. A third of Google's 30,000 workers are contractors — and many of those jobs will disappear. (Conveniently, when a contract ends, it's not deemed a layoff.) And superfluous offices are being shut.

More importantly, Google's employees no longer have free rein to pursue their own ideas. Google's engineers can spend 20 percent of time on side projects. That freedom remains, in theory, but the progress a lone engineer can make on a new website without hardware and additional personnel is limited. The new message: Fiddle all you want, but don't expect any money from Google to back your creation.

When Google went public in 2004, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin told shareholders to get ready to be taken for a ride. Not in so many words, of course. But in the company's IPO prospectus, they defended the company's already-lavish perks, and said that investors should expect spending to go up, not down.

But Larry and Sergey have grown tired of coddling their employees. Far from being grateful, the perks have made employees feel entitled. Brin in particular has complained about workers taking bowls of M&Ms and free bottled water for granted.

Why should Google's founders care, really? They seem increasingly detached from Google's core business, preferring to spend time on rockets and electric sports cars rather than optimizing AdWords. They increasingly deal with a small core of early Google employees, all IPO lottery winners, who are similarly insulated from the economic reality of living in one of the most expensive areas in the U.S.

A famous example of their cluelessness: Brin allowed his sister-in-law, Susan Wojcicki, also a Google executive, to spend millions of Google's money on a new child-care center which dramatically raised its costs. Rather than revise plans to make child-care more affordable, Google started charging employees nearly twice the market rate.

Investors will be unbothered by Larry and Sergey's change of heart. And employees, after they get done grumbling, will likely content themselves with the reality that they still have jobs.

No, the people hit hardest by this will be Google's flacks — and the servile journalists who so eagerly celebrated Google's lava-lamp culture. What stories will they tell now? How Google is cutting corners on the organic foie-gras hamburgers in its cafes?