Sent in by the friend of an ultimately unsuccessful Google applicant, the test was supposed to be completed by the applicant within three days. It asks for a response to an imaginary request from an imaginary Google manager, for an analysis of whether the company — "Poogle," not Google, mind you — can hire 750 engineers in six months to launch a new product within 12 months (click to enlarge):

This is a terrible question. The only issue is whether it is an intentional one, designed to test the applicant.

It's terrible because doubling the number of engineers on the sort of product Google makes — software — emphatically does not make it ship faster, certainly not within the first six months of their work, and certainly not at the scale of 750 engineers.

This has been widely understood among software managers since the publication of Frederick Brooks' Mythical Man Month in 1975. As blogger and former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky summarized the thesis 25 years later:

When you add more programmers to a late project, it gets even later. That's because when you have n programmers on a team, the number of communication paths is n(n-1)/2, which grows at O(n2).

From Mythical Man Month:

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them. This is true for... picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many woman are assigned...

Since software construction is inherently a systems effort — an exercise in complex interrelationships — communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.

Even when a software team can benefit from some organic growth (as opposed to Poogle's doubling), it's going to take on the order of six months just to get the new people up to speed on the existing code base and trained in corporate peculiarities, which at Google are significant due to the scale at which it operates (Ken Thompson, legendary co-creator of the Unix operating system and inventor of Google's new Go programming language, still isn't allowed to check in code there, having failed to jump through the requisite hoops, he recently said in the book Coders at Work ).

So "Poogle" shouldn't be asking whether it needs to hire more recruiters to add 750 new programmers to "Product X" in six months; it should be asking whether the feature list for Product X should be trimmed, the deadline lengthened or a subset of it easily split off into Product Y.

But maybe Google is asking candidates to come up with that answer on their own. Whoops.

Supporting documents supplied as tabs to the test:

This one goes on; we've cut it off:

(Top pic: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Getty.)

Google VP Bradley Horowitz (pictured) explained things at the annual Supernova conference in San Francisco the other day. He said the company intentionally (and selflessly!) leaves some brainpower outside its walls, according to the Register.

"I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people...

But [the engineer] stopped me and said: 'These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google.'"

This is very generous of Google, given that it hires "the world's best engineers" via a grueling interview process, complete with quizzes. Some of its best employees had to short-circuit the system, but that only makes it more perfect, right?

Thankfully, Google is using this system for good, rather than evil, by turning down job prospects, for being too awesome. Now that's Christmas spirit: It's a sort of gift to the world. Not to the possible hires, of course, but in this economy they'll be working for an awesome company like Google in no time, right??

(Pic by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten)

And that's among so-called "movers and shakers;" life might be even tougher on the rank and file. On the one hand, they get copious and diverse free snacks, food from the likes of David Chang and a very competitive salary. But on the other, there's the chaos that results from Google digesting acquisitions like DoubleClick and losing top executives like former ad chief Tim Armstrong. Some of the purported fallout, gleaned from the gossip in Business Insider's post:

• Advertising VP Penry Price is said to have lost power when Armstrong left and to be "looking for a way out."
• Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms, supposedly lost an internal power struggle. One source told BI: "It wouldn't suprise me to see him leave after a while."
  
• Director of media platforms Eileen Naughton won that aforementioned power strugle but supposedly wants to leave because she "thinks it's a crazy place and wants to get the hell out of there."
  
• Google's first Gotham engineer, Engineering Director Craig Nevill-Manning, is so rich, presumably on Google options, that people wonder if he'd rather be "traveling around in Africa having a fun time."
  
• M&A guy Jason Harinstein is said to be "poachable."

So there you have it: Google is a tough place to work in part because of the distracting wealth you earn there and because the awesome job offers you get as a result of working there. Sounds unbearable.

(Pic: Google New York, by Eddie Codel)

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.

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.

It turns out the rumor circulating during Internet Week (and surfaced by Business Insider) is true: There will be no 2009 companywide trips to Disneyland or anywhere else, we hear.

The internet giant has been in contraction mode, laying off employees and cutting costs at its sprawling corporate campus.

But Google will pay for individual business units to take group retreats, an insider tells us, helping mitigate the loss of all-Googler revelry. After Googlers went stir-crazy at the local airport where they were standed during last year's trip, the company may have decided rounding up hordes of programmers for a vacation simply wasn't worth the headaches.

In any case, if employees are to survive in an increasingly hardbitten environment, it's probably best they grow up as quickly as they can. And mouse ears are so early 2008.

(Pic: Googlers line up for a group shot at Disneyland last year, by Matt Pagel on Flickr)

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)

Dennis,

The NYC Googlers in the Ad Sales department are grateful for your arrival. Wow, you could not have come sooner. The office was falling apart. Armstrong was running his many businesses and promoting the most incompetent early Googlers to high ranking positions. Please take note of a few problems.

* The vast majority of your team managers have NO direct advertising sales experience. Many come from agencies but those of us who have actually worked on the outside know that very few people successfully transition from agency to sales.
* What is the scoop with this HOI position? Are you kidding me? These people are quintessential middle management. Call in McKinsey amnd see what they think. Most HOIS with the exception of Dan Schock have never sold. Pavelko dresses terribly and has the single worst breath.
* What do the Vertical heads do? Have you ever heard some of them speak at conferences? So now you have the Vertical Head and the HOI and the team Manager....
* Let's discuss the team managers again. Are you kidding? Do you see the problem?
* Now you have gone and taken your BEST salespeople and put them on a display team. Have you heard how they have been treated? They actually no how to build relationshipss, sell and entertain but they are now overwhelmed by middle managers. What happened to the good old days of risk taking. Now it is death by meeting with spread sheets and bs.
* Please fix this mess sire. Please.
* BTW, what is with the stuttering Castelli. He was the Publisher at 3rd tier magazines but now he is heading the east coast? Have you heard him speak?He cannot get a word out. He has no visibility and barely understands the products. Have him take you through a deep dive.
* Agency? Are you kidding me? Do you see the problems? How many Ivy educated people does it take to call a customer? Trust me, customers are annoyed. They are not getting service they deserve. OSO is pathetic and GMS has not a clue. Every other major company has salespeople who know how to call the agency and customer. At Google, we discuss it first.

HELP us little man.

NYC

The New York Observer treats her 1,000-person email subscriber list as if it amounted to a brilliant new startup. It isn't, of course. Daily Candy, the urban fashion email list, had 2.5 million subscribers when Comcast bought it. McGivney's Jauntsetter is as much a business venture as it is an outgrowth of the dilettantish hobby of travel.

The colleagues who joined Google at the same time as McGivney were worth an average of $7.8 million as of November 2007; even with the drop in Google's shares, their typical personal fortune would still exceed $3 million — and more if they sold at the peak. They may be about the only people who have enough money to set out on such jaunts. It's a perfectly fine venture for McGivney to write up trip tips for her ex-colleagues. There's just not 2.5 million of them.

Google is preparing to announce its earnings as soon as markets close today. The search giant just had its first real layoffs last week, with 100 recruiters given the axe. (Previously, the company had only laid people off to consolidate jobs after an acquisition.) The company also closed some satellite engineering offices, but officials said the company would try to place those engineers elsewhere. If the layoffs are happening, there may not be seats for them.

That's hardly the worst of the news, if the rumor's true. Google has approximately 6,000 engineers; a 5 percent cut, 300 people, would barely be felt by the organization. But before Google lays off any engineers, it will surely slash payrolls in other departments — which means the total could well exceed 1,000. (A Google spokeman, Jon Murchinson, did not immediately return a phone call or email.)

The layoff may not happen. But the fear in the Googleplex is well-founded. It's not that Google is bleeding money; Wall Street is expecting it to report 2008 revenues of $15.8 billion, with still-handsome profit margins. And it may even surprise analysts with better-than-expected numbers. But the economy is parlous, and Google is simply not growing like it did in the first years after its 2004 IPO. Google's headcount has nearly doubled in size to 20,100 in two years. And we hear that Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who set out to recreate at the Googleplex the academic environment they knew at Stanford University, are growing increasingly disenchanted with how soft and spoiled Google's engineers have become.

Before Google let go many of its 10,000 contractors last fall, they were doing much of the company's gruntwork. For the first time, many Google engineers are finding they have to do serious, boring work that actually contributes to the company's bottom line, rather than pursuing fanciful ideas of Googly new products. To the extent that they fit the caricacture of a Google engineer, many may whine — in which case, they may well find themselves unburdened of the work, and the paycheck that came with it.

In the last dotcom bust, Google's managers quite deliberately kept hiring while almost every other tech company shed staff; they were a legendary beacon of hope for Silicon Valley's unemployed engineers. And when Google filed to go public, cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin made grand promises about treating their employees well — upping spending on perks and pay over time, rather than cutting them.

Page and Brin have spared their employees by firing contractors by the thousands, from Google's free cafeterias to its in-house tech-support kiosks. But the pain of the economy has at last hit Google's staff. (Google has only had one previous staff layoff of note, eliminating superfluous employees after acquiring DoubleClick.)

The recruiters are surely the first wave of layoffs. Some analysts estimate that Google, which has spent freely on frivolous side projects, could run its business with a quarter of the employees it has now; the sheer profitability of its search-advertising monopoly has hidden its inefficient experimentation for years. Google's first real layoff will not be its last.

Update: And sure enough: Google has closed an engineering office in Austin, five months after it opened with a lavishly catered party, as well as others in Norway and Sweden. It is also, quite sensibly, shuttering little-used products including Jaiku and Dodgeball, two services similar to Twitter but without its adoption.

Where did the other 6,000 go? The 4,300 were only a "subset" of the 10,000 contractors Brin cited, a spokeswoman told the Associated Press, implying that the cuts were not as heavy as the numbers might suggest. But in the filing, they were described as "temps, interns, contractors, and vendors" — a more expansive category, not a less inclusive one.

How classically Google, which seeks to make all the information in the world easily accessible — except when it has to do with Google's own business.

Whatever the numbers, Valleywag tipsters have consistently told us of heavy cuts. Deep Fried, a source within Google's kitchens, told us last fall of the unprecedented closure of one of Google's free-food emporiums, a cornerstone of Google's culture of employee perks.

And now, another perk — on-site technical support — is getting slashed to almost nothing. Our source writes:

I got laid off from google’s internal helpdesk a few months back; now I’m watching my google talk list drop one by one while a colleague there gives a play by play. Apparently the vendor is cutting costs (at Google’s request per my previous boss) by axing most of my friends in the mountain view call center (tech stop now). When I was there there were 24 people, three of us were axed when I left, two more people have quit in the interim but weren’t replaced in headcount. As of this writing, five of best techs have been escorted out – mostly the ones working way below what they were worth to keep their jobs alongside the Hyderabad call center.

Keep in mind that I love Google, Inc. and I think they’re trying their best to survive a shitty, shitty market without their employees getting hit too hard or looking weak in the press. It’s the vendors and contractors that are sweating bullets, since Google can only go to them and say “reduce your cost by X” and most of the vendors bend over backwards to keep the contract rather than negotiate. To illustrate how far backwards they’re willing to bend, all the layoffs from SlashSupport have been chosen soley by HR, with no input from the supervisors or leads. Google said “we can no longer pay for this amount of headcount,” and the knee-jerk reaction was to fire the people that the Slash HR person disliked the most. Slash HR never even set foot on the mountain view campus until they turned up with a stack of pink slips already filled out. Google can’t do anything about it aside from threaten to not renew the contract.

Tech Stop Now, the telephone helpdesk, is operated by SlashSupport. It looks like this is being gutted down to a skeleton crew before the contract is up for renewal in April; they probably intend to move the whole thing to the Hyderabad help desk, who are quite a bit cheaper to operate. Either that or Slash knows the contract is dead and they’re taking the opportunity to trim the fat so it’s cheaper when they have to give severance to the remaining eleven mountain view techs.

Yes, this means that from 9am to 6pm pacific, only eleven people at maximum are available to field tech support calls from across every Google office in the world. Estimates are that at least 50 issues a day will go unhandled and be passed off to the Hyderabad help desk. Used to be zero.

TSA – Tech Stop, the guys who sit in the rooms that are in almost every building and get to watch Futurama on a projector while they fix hardware that’s brought to them. TSA means alternately Tech Stop Associate or Tech Stop Astreya, as Astreya is the vendor for them. I am getting word today that TSAs are also getting reamed.

Who's being spared? For now, the elite tech-support crews on staff at Google, who fall into two groups:

FT – Field techs. Full time google employees. TSN and TSA escalate to these guys if it is something to do with confidential information,* needs someone with admin privileges beyond what TSN/TSA has, or something that really, really needs someone at the desk that is unencumbered with vendor NDAs about intellectual property. FTs also do a fair bit of coding and engineering, but as much as I think my SlashSupport NDA is garbage, Google’s is a lot more frightening :)

There are also xtechs, who are dedicated field techs that serve JUST the executives, but I’ve only ever seen one of them in person. Executives never came to Saladoplex where most of IT was quarantined to avoid offending visitors to the main iplex.

The Saladoplex is a cluster of offices across a parkway from Google's main campus. Heard more about contractor cuts at Google? Send in your tips.

Update: A tech-support contractor writes:

I too was laid off by SlashSupport, the helpdesk vendor. I was laid off on Monday, 7 of the remaining 16 of us were cut - That's a 43.75% cut. However, our whole team was also asked for resumes for a possible 6-7 conversions to FieldTechs, indicating that Google may be trying to retain the best of us. Many of those who remain in the helpdesk are not Google-quality, and all 7 of those of us laid off had had some sort of disagreement with Slash's HR manager, so we're certain that the selections were retaliatory in nature.

The move by Google to keep some tech-support staff is noble, if odd, since the search giant has an unofficial hiring freeze on. It speaks to the kind of tensions that exist between Google and contract firms like SlashSupport.

(Photo by Getty Images)

Top Googlers, overheard at a holiday party, chattered about Mayer's departure as a matter of if, not when. And in some ways, it's surprising she's stayed as long as she has.

First of all, she's wealthy. That "19th employee" bit is code, within Silicon Valley, for "rich"; the earlier an employee joins a startup which succeeds, the more money they make. With Google, which is still worth $96 billion after its stock tumble, that translates into hundreds of millions of dollars for Mayer, who owns a penthouse apartment in San Francisco's Four Seasons, another home in outrageously pricey Palo Alto, and a large (if questionably tasteful) art collection, including original glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly. A couture hound, she once paid $60,000 for a lunch with Oscar de la Renta, and she owns part of I Dream of Cake, a "cake gallery" in North Beach, as a way of indulging her pastry fetish.

So she's already made her money. And her career? Mayer, who joined Google in 1999 straight out of Stanford's graduate computer-science department, rose quickly through the ranks. A stint dating Google cofounder Larry Page surely didn't hurt her chances, but she won promotions first to director and then to vice president mostly by dint of a schedule of robotic overwork and an obsession with keeping the search engine's homepage sparse and free of clutter. Her looks — blonde, Midwestern, unusually attractive for Silicon Valley — helped her win magazine covers. And she won fans among Google's tight-knit top management, even as underlings groaned about her scattered, arbitrary management style.

But the lack of turnover in Google's excuive ranks has hurt her chances of rising farther. Jonathan Rosenberg, a six-year veteran of Google who's close to its founders and a regular on its quarterly earnings calls with Wall Street analysts, would be hard to displace. While Mayer photographs well, she's an awkward public speaker — that awful, offputting giggle! And really, she already runs the world's most successful search engine, which continues to steal share from well-funded rivals. What else could she do at Google to match that?

It's a good time to leave: Mayer just got engaged to Zack Bogue, a property manager and lawyer who, importantly, looks good on his fiancée's arm at the San Francisco society events she favors. She'll no doubt be courted by venture capitalists, too, to run companies. But if I had to bet, I'd put my money on her returning to Stanford, where she now teaches computer-science classes in her spare time. Academia is the environment most like the comforting cocoon of Google, where she's spent her entire working life. From a professor, a nerdy laugh is almost expected.

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.