San Fran-where?

On BA transatlantic flights, even the economy passengers get sparkling wine, it would seem. The flight was quite pleasant; comfortable, even. :)

On the subject of comfort, the apartment they've put me up in is fairly pleasant - more space than I know what to do with really. Actually, no, who am I kidding, it's a really nice place, and very well kitted out - there's even an iPod dock in the radio by the bed. All I need now is an iPod. :P

There are three of us from the London office here for the first couple of weeks but after that I'm on my own - it really couldn't be a more gentle introduction. One of my colleagues hired a car, so I'm even being chauffeured around - although on the days my colleagues feel compelled to go to the gym at (censored) o'clock in the morning I tend to get the "Gbus" - Google run free bus services around most of the bay area for employees to get to/from work. They have mobile wi-fi hotspots in them too, for those who can't face being disconnected from the internet for the length of the journey...

I've either lost or left behind my GPS, so this week started out with me regularly getting lost. Good old fashioned paper maps, who'd have thought I'd be using those again? Google don't loan out GPS devices it seems but I do at least have a company mobile now to save "Where did you park the car?" text messages costing the earth.

Although it was grey and slightly rainy when we got here on Monday night, since then it's been a fairly consistent temperature - not exactly hot but warm enough to sit outside in comfort for lunch.

Which brings me to the food. Yes, the Googlers at Mountain View definitely have the best of it. The cafe in London is superb, but the sheer variety here is a delight - there are maybe a couple of dozen buildings or so, and no fewer than fourteen cafes, so I'm told. Each place is different - DIY hand-made waffles for breakfast in the No-Name Cafe, a delicious burrito at Andales for lunch, succulent steak fillets at Charlie's in the evening. The BigTable cafe (a fantastic name) has a Lego theme: most of the tables are adorned with a miscellany of half-built Lego creations, and even the signs are made of Lego. I aim to make my way to all the cafes here before I go; admittedly the site is quite spread out, so that'll involve a bit of travelling - unquestionably worth it though. Such travel is made easier by the Gbikes scattered everywhere - just grab one when you want to go somewhere, and leave it when you get there.

The buildings themselves are slightly more interesting than your average offices, but it's everything else which really differentiates the place - beanbags and sofas clustered in corners, and yes, I have indeed seen a ball-pool... There's even a big circular sandy area in the courtyard outside in which lies beach-volleyball court! Look up "Googleplex" on Google Maps and see the pictures - it's quite a pretty place. Turn on the user-contributed photos and you can see a variety of details, including amongs other things a dinosaur.

Workwise there's not a great deal to say, but I've been to a few really interesting meetings and presentations - some of the development tools they're using are really nifty, and the meeting I attended about metrics and static analysis was most encouraging. Yes, I probably am working harder here than I did at my previous job, but I'm doing it because I'm enjoying it - their attitude towards doing things the Right Way(TM) is really great, and quite all-pervading. There are even regularly changed tips about good coding practice on the backs of the toilet doors.

The experience of TGIF in Mountain View is greatly different from that in London - here alongside the beer they have a few presentations and a Q&A session, and it doesn't seem to last as long as in London. Lovely snacks though; today's was Mardi Gras themed, for obvious reasons.

I like it here.

Pre-flight checks

First of all, again sorry for not writing sooner; this is for a variety of reasons.

1. BT still haven't managed to sort the phone line in my flat, so I've still no internet at home. I even bought a handset to plug into the socket so that I could verify that not only did it have a dial tone but dialling 17070 informed me not only which circuit it was connected to but also that it was definitely a BT line (it then presented me with a variety of line test options). BT didn't seem to be able to do anything useful with this information, amazingly, and say they'll have to send an engineer out at a cost of ~£120... Well, for the next month at least it can wait, as I'm not going to be in the country anyway! :)
   
2. I have been somewhat busy - not just with getting to grips with the new job but also progressively extracting my possessions from my previous (shared) house and transporting them up to London.
3. I've actually had relatively little to write about; a great deal of it would just read as "More of the same." - and I didn't want this to degrade into a mere catalogue of menu choices!

However, relating to the third point above, as I'd previously said I was somewhat unsure of what was appropriate material to post. Whilst Google are pretty open about most things, they are understandably wary of inadvertent public statements/leaks - so in the absence of guidelines more specific/reassuring than "If in doubt, don't talk about your work" I've been erring on the safe side while waiting for them to get back to me. However, get back to me they did, and the very helpful chap from corporate comms reassured me that as long as I didn't go divulging any secrets everything would be fine - and in fact that they actively encourage blogging!

So, a little about my job. As I've said, I'm working in the Engineering Productivity division: ensuring that the products are well-written, well-tested, and simultaneously making the lives of the developers easier. QA, in essence. Whilst at first glance this might sound a little dry and uninteresting (coming from a programming perspective), it's really not:

• Whilst our raison d'etre isn't to be working on products directly, actually most of the work does involve working on projects. I've been working with the AdSense team in London, and to get to know the codebase and procedures better I've been given a few bugs/feature requests to implement. Relatively trivial things so far, but a pleasant gentle introduction.
• Although we may not work directly on external products, many internal tools and systems do (as I understand it) come under the umbrella of Engineering Productivity - such as the automated/distributed build and test systems for example, or the design/implementation of metrics to assist/guide the software engineers. We were, for example, discussing the other day the possibility of using the bug database to examine the correlations between parts of the codebase and the severity of bugs discovered (by seeing which areas were changed in the fixing of which bugs.) This would give a useful insight into which areas were most critical and/or fragile - information which could be used a) by the developers as a "treat with caution" indicator and b) to cross-correlate with test coverage analysis to indicate the areas which would most benefit from further testing.
  
• In some senses, the role is partly an advisory one - giving the developers assistance and encouraging best practice - making it thus exposed to the latest techniques and approaches.

So not so boring after all! Not for me at least - these are topics which matter quite a lot to me - and are in fact the reason I took the job! The metrics work appeals to me especially - unfortunately this is largely taking place in Mountain View, but I hope to meet up with them while I'm up there in the coming weeks.

That said, the food is superb and still surprising me every day: partridge? (it was definitely a game bird, can't remember exactly), delicious duck, Caribbean cuisine, Spanish, the list goes on and on. I had a delicious paella for lunch which had exciting-looking crustaceans in it, claws and all - langoustines? Sadly the restaurant's dishwasher is still kaput so we're using disposable plastic cutlery... which wasn't quite up to the task of tackling a langoustine unfortunately. The rest of it was great though!

Come Monday I'm off to the US, where I'll be staying for a month in a corporate apartment - managed by Marriott it would seem, so I have high hopes. :)

Anyway, hopefully this long entry has made up for my recent silence!

Catch-up

Well, as I said I've been a little busy moving house to write blog entries, and I still haven't got ADSL at home - I haven't even got a phone line!

Friday's TGIF was fun; I can categorically confirm that once a week Google do indeed provide free beer and pizza! I got to meet a lot of people, chatted, played table football, and probably had a couple too many. :)

Looks like I'm going to spend a whole month out in California, for a number of meetings and Ads classes as well as the aforementioned "Noogler training". Definitely going to be an interesting experience.

Food was less exciting today, but I could hardly call a salmon fillet in a filo parcel disappointing. ;)

Lack of blogging

Sorry for the recent silence, folks - all is well, I just moved house at the weekend and haven't got broadband set up yet! I'll add some more later today with a little luck.

Working at Google London - YouTube video

This gives a brief glimpse of Google London - was linked to in my induction meeting yesterday, but we didn't watch it 'cause we were short of time.

Working at Google London

Quite accurate and representative from what I've experienced so far - remarkably devoid of spin for a corporate "Life at x" presentation.

Almost a whole week now...

... and rather than beginning to grate, the "Googleness" of it all is actually surprisingly pleasant. Yes, the colour-scheme can feel a little on the garish side from time to time and takes a little getting used to, and yes, the shoe-horning of bits of the word "Google" into everything ("Noogler", "Goobuntu" etc) is possibly a little more cringe-worthy than comic; but there's something quite reassuringly straight-forward and genuine about the place, and I think it all derives from the same thing: an almost childish sense of exuberance and enthusiasm, which is very hard not to get swept up in.

I mean, sure, they have their share of cynics, but it's different somehow - they're busy, constructive cynics. I haven't spotted a single Dilbert stereotype yet, not one. And I'm not trying to imply it's some sort of corporate ant-farm where everyone's the same - far from it. Everyone brings different attitudes and approaches to the job, and here they're actively encouraged to stand out and speak up. And they do.

Now I've got a desktop PC and have got most of the administrative trivia out of the way, I've been spending most of my time going through the countless "If you're new here, accustom yourself with x, y and z." tasks. I'm currently working my way through the introduction to Perforce, amongst other things.

I'm told that my first week hasn't been a typical one - what with one thing and another (especially the snow!) it's all been a bit backwards: today I had my introductory meeting with HR, and tomorrow I meet my manager. Just like any large company Google run big corporate induction sessions too: in a few weeks I'm off to Mountain View in California to attend a fortnight of "Noogler training"... and whilst the phrase still makes me wince I'm really looking forward to it!

The perks of the job are definitely not to be underestimated, I must say - not that this is exactly controversial, but having been sitting staring at a computer for hours, a nice massage really is just what you need: it really makes the whole day more pleasant. And I had a kangaroo steak for dinner this evening!

Tomorrow will be my first experience of TGIF - their weekly corporate 'break out the beer and pizza' feel-good sessions. And again, I'm quite looking forward to it. :)

First impressions

Today I found out a little more about what I'm going to be doing.

It seems that the SET (Software Engineering in Test) group of which I was to be a member appears to have merged with other bits to become the "Engineering Productivity and Test" group, the mandate of which seems amazingly broad: to make it easier for the developers to make good products. This includes not just the writing of tools to improve their productivity and ensuring that the build and test mechanisms are working well and quickly, but even the creating and analysing of metrics to provide information to better focus their efforts, or even improve their practices. I wonder whether it extends to making them tea? ;)

Whilst the above is the group of which I'm notionally a member, those people appear primarily to get assigned to work with particular product teams - I'm working with the AdSense team.

I'm not sure which if any of the things we discussed are safely repeatable, so for the moment I'll err on the side of caution. Google are understandably keen on avoiding leaks about new products and features, but I don't know to what degree that also applies to the internal processes and support projects. They seem to be pretty sane about such things, though.

What interested me most about today was the apparently extremely high level of autonomy in the engineers - whilst authority in a conventional sense probably exists at Google, it certainly wasn't very evident. If you feel that something's a good idea, you do it; or at least that's the impression I got today. However the system works, though, it clearly works.

Non-starter

Google, it would seem, is no more immune to weather than anyone else. :)

As I'm currently staying in temporary accommodation which is at most 5 minutes walk from Google's offices, I had no trouble getting there through the 6-8" of snow this morning; others were not so fortunate. As a consequence, the best laid plans went quite firmly awry; and whilst I made some generic "Noogler" progress today thanks to a number of very helpful individuals, I am no closer to knowing what I'll actually be working on. (And yes, a "Noogler" really is what the other "Googlers" call new starters!)

Today was thus a bit of an odd day, but it wasn't all a waste of time - I had a nice fruit salad and a kiwi smoothie for breakfast and a selection of delicious sushi for lunch. ;)

For those who are interested, the London site is, quite predictably, largely white with splashes of primary colours, and feels very airy and light; lots of the doors and partitions are glass. However, whilst the offices are predominantly open-plan, the sight-lines are broken up by large numbers of little offices and meeting rooms and the place fortunately manages to avoid feeling like a warehouse. However, as I said, there weren't very many people in today - I don't quite know what it'll be like when it's full!

Having expressed a preference for Apple over Microsoft, the corporate laptop now sitting beside me is a very shiny MacBook Pro, not that I've done a great deal with it yet. I get the impression that most of the actual development is done on Linux machines.

Almost everything I did today, as one might have predicted, was through a web-browser: looking up new-starter information and to-do lists, HR-related admin etc. In some respects, this doesn't differ greatly from many other companies these days - it seems increasingly common for companies to automate their processes by embedding them in a web application. What does differ (although again this is hardly news) is that conventional email, calendar, instant messaging, and even document-writing applications are all absent - the web-browser is instead the universal applications platform. Well, perhaps not quite universal; I did spot the reassuring presence of a variety of more conventional text-editors. :)

Aside from that not much to report really; roll on day 2...

First post

Well, I've never written a blog before; aside from having had neither the time nor the inclination I've never had the right kind of arrogance to presume that I had anything about which I could write something that anyone might actually want to read.

This blog, in contrast, is being written as a time-saving device. So many people have requested to be kept informed about my experiences of working for Google that if I informed everyone separately I'd have no time to do anything else! So, my apologies for being a little impersonal:

"Please don't ask how I'm getting on, as a URL often offends." ;-)

First day tomorrow; I'm meeting my mentor for breakfast at 9.