Hello everyone,

There has been a lot of concern and debate on campus about abuse of the guest privilege in the cafes.  We wanted to take the opportunity to review our guest policies and ask for your help in enforcing them.

1 - Every Google employee and intern in Mountain View is allowed two meals per month in our cafes for personal guests. 

We understand that there may be an occasional month when you have special visitors in town and you exceed two personal guests (4 family members visiting from Omaha?) but we trust you not to exceed more than an average of 2 personal guests per month. 

2 - After reviewing the number of guests on campus each day, we have decided to limit the privilege of bringing personal guests on campus to part- and full-time employees and interns only. 

We know that this will be disappointing to our temps, vendors and contractors, but we feel that it is a necessary step to alleviate the over-crowding and congestion on campus.

3 - Everyone is responsible for signing in guests (business or personal) at lobby reception and all guests are required to wear visitor badges visibly while on campus. 

This holds true for lunch and dinner.  Much of the abuse of the guest meal privilege in Mountain View is occurring at dinner time.  To help us maintain security, please refrain from bringing guests on campus on weekends and late evenings. 

4 - Prepared meals in containers are provided at dinner time for people who are working late on campus. 

We know that there has been a lack of clarity about this, but the intention of this meal service is not for people to grab meals "to go" on their way out the door, or to "stock up" on multiple meals.

5 - Anyone bringing a group of business guests to a cafe for lunch should bring them after 1 pm to avoid our peak lunch hour.

To help us to monitor and enforce these guest policies, we will be adding a simple step to the process of signing in guests on campus beginning later this year.  When visitors sign in at reception, they will be asked to identify themselves as a personal or business guest, and to indicate whether they are having a meal in one of our cafes.  If they are, the word "MEAL" will appear on their visitor badge. 

Our on-site meals are intended to foster community building among employees.  We want there to be enough room in our cafes for employees and teams to enjoy meals together.  Abuse of the guest privilege creates over-crowding and congestion, at great expense to the company.  This is an incredible perk that we benefit from each day.  Please do your part to use this privilege appropriately and honestly.

Many thanks,

Laszlo

(Photo by blmurch)

The May memo, promising rates wouldn't rise 75 percent:
The June price hikes:

Wojcicki has modest tastes in cars: She chauffeurs her kids in a Honda Odyssey minivan. But when it comes to spending Google's money, she is far less thrifty. Wojcicki, an early Google employee, was dissatisfied with Google's Kinderplex, which has been run by an outside firm, CCLC. CCLC is used by many companies in the Valley, including Cisco and Electronic Arts, but it wasn't good enough for Wojcicki, who pulled her children out, and set about designing a new Google-owned facility, with a blank check from Brin.

The Kinderplex is losing its lease this month. The Woods and the Wetlands, as Google's new child-care facilities are known, are implausibly plush — and proved hard to staff until Brin and cofounder Larry Page were dissuaded from rejecting caregivers who didn't have a 3.5 GPA from a top school.

The price is likewise out of sight. One of the new centers has 18,500 square feet for 80 children — or 230 sq. ft. per child. Minimum licensing requirements are 35 sq. ft. of usable floor space per child; a more generous recommendation is 50 sq. ft. per child. Even allowing for some space for other uses, that seems extravagant. Brin told employees that the new centers cost $40,000 a year per child to operate — more than the roughly $30,000 a year Google planned to charge employees, but also far above market rates.

That number was also a 75 percent increase over Kinderplex's near-market fees, and the figure sent Googlers, ever driven by data, into a frenzy of mathematical modeling. Detailed proposals for reducing the cost of the centers came out — and were ignored.

Google's chief child-care officer sent an email out a few weeks ago promising that prices wouldn't be raised 75 percent. Sure enough, they weren't. Instead, Google's head of HR, Laszlo Bock, told employees earlier this week that prices would be raised a mere ... 70 percent.

The monthly fee for a preschooler is rising from $1,070 to $1,710; for an infant, it's rising from $1,470 to $2,390. At those prices, one parent says, if you had two kids, you could afford to just hire a nanny instead.

For the likes of Wojcicki, a top Google executive and an IPO lottery winner, those costs are inconsequential; having a luxurious child-care center near the Google campus is more important. But for workaday Googlers, especially those who didn't join the company before the IPO, those prices are out of sight. Even Bock, Google's chief people officer who was saddled with the unfortunate task of explaining Wojcicki's decisions, has told fellow Googlers he will take his children elsewhere rather than pay the new rates.

We hear that one top Google lawyer has quit over the price hike — not because she couldn't afford it, but because the way Brin's inner circle decided it, without consulting the data. (This departure may come back to haunt the company.)

Google used to be a place where rank didn't matter: If the numbers showed you were right, Larry and Sergey could be persuaded. That Brin let his sister-in-law's wealthy whims rule over the interests of hundreds, if not thousands, of working Googlers shows that Google is becoming yet another big company, with an insular clique at its heart. What it proves is that at Google today, it's not what you know. It's who you know.

How lucky for Wojcicki's kids that her mother has friends in high places. How unfortunate that other parents don't. One can't fault Wojcicki for wanting good things for her children. But doing so with Google's money, creating a luxury service affordable only to top executives and IPO lottery winners? That's inexcusable.

But this week's SEC filing painted a different picture of orkut, as Google warned investors that its "ability to generate revenue from services in which we have invested considerable time and resources, such as YouTube, Gmail, Orkut and Google Checkout" poses a risk to the company. Buyukkokten, meanwhile, has made enough off Google to buy a three-story apartment in San Francisco and hire male strippers for a birthday party.

"I don't actually have that data at my fingertips," was Bock's reply. "I apologize." Ludicrous. Google runs on numbers. Had that been Bock's answer in a presentation to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he would have been frog-marched out of the Googleplex by security. Let me venture a guess here: Bock knew the figure, at least approximately, and realized it was embarrassing. Recently, Google itself has provided evidence of this.

Forward to 55:09 in the clip above to check out the size and makeup of the audience at a Google Talk sponsored last month by what Bock characterized as the "very strong" Black Googler Network. Judging by the crowd BGN drew to a talk by Ralph Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad, Google's dominant ethnic group is the invisible man.