Today’s SF Chronicle contains a look at Google’s growing pains, with the company having long outgrown the small company description. Matter of fact, it is looking more and more like another large and bureaucratic outfit:
But Google is also feeling growing pains. It added an average of 10 employees every business day in the last quarter. Workers, of which there were 4,183 at last count, can no longer assume that colleagues know everything that’s going on in the company. As everyone expected, Google is turning into a huge corporation.
“As you get bigger, it’s more of a challenge to get everyone on the same page,” said Peter Norvig, director of search quality.
And then there are longer-term employees who are busily cashing out their stock, albeit still avoiding the potential embarassment of being spotted flaunting wealth in the Google parking lot:
Google’s workers don’t appear to be spending much on cars, at least the ones they drive to work. At the headquarters on a recent day, the parking lot was full of Fords and Toyotas, with nothing more extravagant than a smattering of BMWs.
Employees do appear to be comfortable buying homes, said Catherine Marcus, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s International Reality. She said she has represented several such house-hunters on the Peninsula.
One moved up from a condominium in Mountain View — a “tiny thing,” as Marcus described it — that sold for $738,000. His new home, a Los Altos Hills mansion with ample stonework, cost around $5 million, she said.
“It’s not done defiantly. Not the ‘Oh, let me buy the biggest and best house,’ ” Marcus said. “It’s more the contrary. It’s more like: ‘I want a house on the smaller side, but I want it to be architecturally gorgeous and in a cool neighborhood.’ ”
One newly minted Google millionaire was touring a mansion for sale in Los Gatos. After climbing a hill in the yard and enjoying the view, he asked the real estate agent an unusual question: Could he build a Ferris wheel on the property?
Related posts:
eh . . $5 million dollar house thats on the smaller side but architecturally gorgeous and in a cool neighborhood . . . either an oxymoron or sign of structural issues in the Bay Area housing market. . . probably both