Life at Googleplex!

It's hard to figure out, for first time visitors to Googleplex located at 1600, Amphitheatre Parkway, Mount View California, if the campus they are in is a hi-tech hotbed or a play school.

Googleplex is the headquarters of the Internet economy titan, Google. There are red, green, yellow, purple and orange coloured soft toys scattered around on a red couch placed on a distractingly multi-coloured carpet.

A two-seater plane is suspended mid air and a toy T-Rex close by seems to be hunting a toy flamingo. It’s almost unimaginable that the cutting edge technological innovation half the world seems to fear can be born in an atmosphere of such puerility. But then, Google is hard to figure out.

Over the last few years Google has consistently topped several ‘best employer’ surveys globally to the extent that its number one billing is now taken for granted.

The company’s carefully assembled university campus like environment -- lava lamps, massage chairs, free gourmet food courts -- has been the subject of saturation media coverage.

But despite its much-lionised and benign corporate credo ‘Do No Evil’, and a self-projected work culture that would appear to border on bohemian anarchism, Google gives media and technology giants from Redmond to New York to Minato sleepless nights. For the conspiracy theorists, Google’s takeover of the world is imminent.

James Monroe, Paris Hilton, Obama, Ciroc, Sura Zuri Mccants, and Lift Magic are names that randomly scroll across a giant LCD screen in the lobby of Google’s California headquarters.

A shiny piano stands alongside. “These are most popular searches happening around the world at this moment," the Google visitor’s guide informs.

Googleplex, as one discovers, is a labyrinth of LCDs. A little ahead, more giant screens display some of the most cutting-edge work that’s currently transpiring inside the company’s laboratories.

An innovation by the name of Gmail would’ve run across this very LCD back in 2004, one of the many outcomes of Google’s HR initiative -- ‘The 20 per cent time’, which requires Googleites to spend a 20 per cent of their time on projects that interest them, unrelated to their day jobs.

One of the LCD screens shows a trend-analyser which plots a nation’s GDP against its average life expectancy. Another LCD screen displays what is considered Google’s coolest recent invention.

Colourful little dots emerge out in streams from a rotating digital earth. The dots, representing real time searches, rise from the earth’s surface towards outer space. The colours of the dots -- red, blue and green -- denote the languages in which Google searches are happening at this very instant.

There are two land masses from where no colour dots emerge -- no prizes for guessing that those are Antartica and the Artic Circle where there is still no PC penetration.

The third screen shows a haze of circles -- floating randomly and cris-crossing each other. “This are what patterns in a computer’s mind will look like if it starts -- well, dreaming like humans,” we are told.

“So what is it like working for Google?” we ask an employee, who’s busy posting personal photographs on an office notice board. Google’s notice boards, and even its glass doors, are a free-for-all; Amitabh Bachchan, Rajnikanth and Chiranjeevi peer down at you from various soft boards in the office. “It’s great fun”, says Tan Chade Meng, a software engineer at Google.

Well said, but push employees for a more detailed response and most times the answer would revolve around food. The food culture at Google is institutionalised and everything from M&Ms to fresh fruit juices, colas and pretzels are free. If vending machines are too prosaic, there are specialised foodstations “Charlie’s Grill” , “Back to Albuquerque” , “East Meets West” and “Vegheads”.

The only foodies that have a hard time at Google are the chocaholics; vending machines charge you by the number of calories a bar of chocolates contains.

But if the calories come gratis so do the workouts. Strewn in the hallways are all-terrain bicycles and exercise balls. There’s a workout room with weights and a rowing machine, and foosball, whirlpool and roller hockey matches happen twice a week at the parking lot.

Googlers can shoot pool while taking a break in one of several employee lounges. Also, employees can take an afternoon volley ball break.