What is the date (day, month, and year) at the beginning of The Pirates of Penzance?
Solution follows.
Category: personal
Don’t dis “don’t be evil”
Dear Steve Jobs,
We have some Apple products in our household. Also, I’m an employee of Google.
“Don’t be evil” is not bullshit. I and a lot of my colleagues work there precisely because of that mantra, and many of us are prepared to pack up and leave if we ever discover Google straying meaningfully from it. Gratifyingly, opportunities arise often in which to apply “don’t be evil” to a business or engineering decision, and a culture of vigorous and principled internal debate helps to ensure we choose correctly. Not all cases are black and white, of course (though some are), and it’s possible to err, but on the whole we do pretty well, non-evil-wise, especially compared to, well, every other publicly traded technology company.
In short, I take your remark as a personal insult, not to mention a telling comment on your own sense of right and wrong and, by extension, that of your company. I would welcome a sincere retraction, failing which I will have to reconsider continuing to be an Apple patron.
Thanks,
– Bob
Today I am a man… for thirty years
But then my friends started having bar mitzvahs and I got jealous. So some time in 1979 I informed my parents — who had left the decision up to me, and who thought they were getting off the hook without planning a bar mitzvah — that in fact I wanted to have one and that it had to be before the year was out. I didn’t want to be the only one of my friends whose bar mitzvah spilled over into the next decade!
To have a bar mitzvah I had to be able to read Hebrew, which meant going to Hebrew school, something that bar-mitzvah-bound kids began doing at age eight or nine; and here I was already pushing thirteen, the bar mitzvah age. Forest Hills Jewish Center, a conservative synagogue, wouldn’t take me, because I was too old. (A year later, Yoda would make the same complaint about training Luke Skywalker.) But Temple Sinai, a reform synagogue (now The Reform Temple of Forest Hills), did.
I was the biggest kid in the class but a motivated student. Within just a couple of months I was reading Hebrew fluently — which is to say, I learned the alphabet and the pronunciation, and so could make all the right sounds. Comprehension was something else altogether.
Rabbi Irvin Ungar set my bar mitzvah for the fifteenth of December — just made it! — and began my training. I started attending sabbath services each week to become familiar with the sequence of events and the liturgy. I learned how to chant my Torah portion (“Vayeshev”) and my haftarah. It was my first serious exposure to ritual and I took to it like a duck to water. Combined with Rabbi Ungar’s learned and gregarious mentoring style, and influenced by the involvement of my friend Chuck with his synagogue, I became a surprisingly observant Jew, to the delight of my parents (who, as noted above, were not themselves particularly observant).
While I was receiving religious instruction, my parents were busy planning the reception. They booked a ballroom at the Sheraton in Elmhurst and sent invitations to the extended family. I invited some of my new Hunter friends and a few from my elementary school days. A couple of months before the event, I stopped eating chocolate and fried food entirely, determined that this was the best way to ensure blemish-free skin on the big day. (And it worked!)
The party needed music, and my parents began looking into bands and DJ’s. One musician (with the memorable not-to-be-confused-with-the-auto-repair-chain name Lee Myles) offered to come to our house with a videotape of his band performing — and to bring along a videocassette player, which in 1979 almost no one had. I was beside myself with excitement at the prospect of seeing one of those contraptions in operation in my very own living room, and when he arrived, everything he said to my parents was just so much droning. It took forever before he finally stopped talking and hauled the enormous player out from its carrying case, along with its multifarious cables and adapters. That’s when I finally joined in the conversation, chattering away about the relative merits of coax connectors versus spade lugs, VHS versus Betamax, tuning via channel 2 versus channel 3, etc. In the end we got to see about thirty disappointing seconds of fuzzy video footage before all the equipment got disconnected and put away.
We didn’t hire Lee Myles.
Everything finally came together on this date thirty years ago.
I conducted my parts of the Saturday-morning service so well that I was invited to become Temple Sinai’s first official “rabbi’s assistant,” a position I held for many weeks thereafter. I delivered an original speech about Judaism and becoming a man and so on that I remember not at all, but that was received (atypically for a bar mitzvah speech) attentively and with disbelief that I’d written it myself. And the reception, though mostly a blur, was memorable at least for the poster-sized cartoon wailing wall that my father drew and stood on an easel for my guests to sign (and that became a wall-art fixture at home for years); and for the moment that my friends took me aside and welcomed me to official manhood by literally showering me with foil-wrapped condoms (which were far more giggle-worthy then — and embarrassing to buy — than they are in this age of strident safe-sex awareness).
Some months later, Rabbi Ungar moved far, far away. His replacement, whatever his virtues might have been, was a zero in the motivating-young-people department. My scientific bent (and attendant religious skepticism) reasserted itself, the novelty of a Dixie cup of sweet wine each Saturday morning wore off, and my tenure as rabbi’s assistant, and my flirtation with a devout life, ended soon after.
Postscript. Helen Keller was one of my mom’s heroes, and The Miracle Worker, the story of Keller’s relationship with the blind teacher Annie Sullivan, was one of her favorite movies.
In trying to find a web link for Temple Sinai while writing this article, I ran across an article entitled, “Helen Keller: Citizen of Forest Hills.” It was the first I’d ever heard that my mom’s hero lived in the same neighborhood where (years later) she raised me; I’m not sure my mom ever knew. But more than that — the article reveals that Helen Keller’s Forest Hills house later became the very site of Temple Sinai!
The richest man in town
At its peak during the dot-com boom, my ownership of Amazon.com was worth millions. Thanks to the dot-com crash and some bad planning, I ended up extracting only a fraction of that value, and I still haven’t entirely gotten over it. But it’s hard to feel too bad: it was a great ride, and with the proceeds we bought some cool toys and took some fun trips. It allowed me to earn practically nothing while launching another startup, where today my wife and several others earn a comfortable living. With Amazon money we had a terrific wedding, got a cozy home, and started an amazing family. Like George Bailey, I am the richest man in town.
Here’s lookin’ at you, Amazon. Thanks for everything.
Right move made
The Hiptop and its cloud-like service were designed by Danger, the company I joined late in 2002 just as the very first Hiptop went on the market. I worked on the e-mail part of the back-end service, and eventually came to “own” it. It was a surprisingly complex software system and, like much of the Danger Service, required continual attention simply to keep up with rising demand as Danger’s success grew and more and more Sidekicks came online.
Early in 2005, the Danger Service fell behind in that arms race. Each phone sought to maintain a constant connection to the back end (the better to receive timely e-mail and IM notices), and one day we dropped a bunch of connections. I forget the reason why; possibly something banal like a garden-variety mistake during a routine software upgrade. The affected phones naturally tried reconnecting to the service almost immediately. But establishing a new connection placed a momentary extra load on the service as e-mail backlogs, etc., were synchronized between the device and the cloud, and unbeknownst to anyone, we had crossed the threshold where the service could tolerate the simultaneous reconnection of many phones at once. The wave of reconnections overloaded the back end and more connections got dropped, which created a new, bigger reconnection wave and a worse overload, and so on and so on. The problem snowballed until effectively all Hiptop users were dead in the water. It was four full days before we were able to complete a painstaking analysis of exactly where the bottlenecks were and use that knowledge to coax the phones back online. It was the great Danger outage of 2005 and veterans of it got commemorative coffee mugs.
The graphs depict the normally docile fluctuations of the Danger Service becoming chaotic
The outage was a near-death experience for Danger, but the application of heroism and expertise (if I say so myself, having played my own small part) saved it, prolonging Danger’s life long enough to reach the cherished milestone of all startups: a liquidity event, this one in the form of purchase by Microsoft for half a billion in cash, whereupon I promptly quit (for reasons I’ve discussed at by-now-tiresome length).
Was that ever the right move. More than a week ago, another big Sidekick outage began, and even the separation of twenty-odd miles and 18 months couldn’t stop me feeling pangs of sympathy for the frantic exertions I knew were underway at the remnants of my old company. As the outage drew out day after day after day I shook my head in sad amazement. Danger’s new owners had clearly been neglecting the scalability issues we’d known and warned about for years. Today the stunning news broke that they don’t expect to be able to restore their users’ data, ever.
It is safe to say that Danger is dead. The cutting-edge startup, once synonymous with must-have technology and B-list celebrities, working for whom I once described as making me feel “like a rock star,” will now forever be known as the hapless perpetrator of a monumental fuck-up.
It’s too bad that this event is likely to mar the reputation of cloud computing in general, since I’m fairly confident the breathtaking thoroughness of this failure is due to idiosyncratic details in Danger’s service design that do not apply at a company like, say, Google — in whose cloud my new phone’s data seems perfectly secure. Meanwhile, in the next room, my poor wife sits with her old Sidekick, clicking through her address book entries one by one, transcribing by hand the names and numbers on the tiny screen onto page after page of notebook paper.
Team stein!
Yesterday morning at the doctor’s office I, Bob Glickstein, signed in at the reception desk. I was followed by a man named Milstein. He was followed by a man named Epstein!
Suppose fully 5% of this office’s patients have names ending in “stein” (surely a very generous assumption). The odds of three of those patients showing up in a row at random are slimmer than 8,000 to 1 — and they only get slimmer if the proportion of “stein” patients is less than 5%, as seems likely. (At 2%, the odds shoot up to 125,000 to 1 against.)
The likelier explanation is that it was “stein” day at this particular office. Gratifyingly both Mr. Milstein and Mr. Epstein pronounced it STEEN like I do, not STINE like Drs. Franken- or Ein-. What are the odds of that!
Kai-Fu Lee and me
For the summer of 1987 I had two programming internship job offers. One — the one I accepted — was from Nathaniel Borenstein, who’d been my professor for a comparative programming languages course and liked my take on the design for an e-mail filtering language, which is what the school’s Information Technology Center (ITC) would pay me to implement. The other was to work on a speech recognition project with a different Carnegie Mellon researcher, Kai-Fu Lee. That project had a strong artificial-intelligence flavor, which appealed to me at the time; but after a semester as Nathaniel’s student I knew and liked him, whereas I’d met Kai-Fu Lee only once, for the job interview. That meeting was cordial enough, but I went with the known quantity and the rest is history.
I next heard of Dr. Lee in the 90’s, when he was a senior researcher for Microsoft. He made headlines when he fled Microsoft for Google — just as I did a few years later.
Now comes the news that Kai-Fu Lee is leaving Google. That’s too bad for Google, but at least we still have Al Spector — who was Nathaniel’s old boss and mine at the ITC!
Greatest hits: The Forum
Prompted by a new article in Mother Jones about the Landmark Forum, my friend Spencer recalled my article on the same subject from my old website circa 1998. Here it is, resurrected for the 21st-century web.
The last line — “This remains the central mystery of my life” — no longer applies. It’s still a mystery, but not the central one of my life. That’s reserved for trying to figure out Sarah Palin supporters.
In December 1997, my close friend Steve, an admirably intelligent and level-headed person, announced that he was going to spend an entire three-day weekend at the Forum, a group awareness training seminar run by an outfit called Landmark Education. Cost: $325, and three solid days of his life.
We (that is, Steve’s friends) knew others who’d gone through the Forum in the past. A wave of Forum marketing swept the Carnegie Mellon campus back in the 1980’s. Those classmates who got caught up in it had been transformed into blissed-out zombies who smiled too much, were too understanding, were in touch with their inner whatevers, and went on and on endlessly about “I accept that” and “I’ve always <insert behavior here> but now I understand why I <insert behavior here>” and “I love you all” and so on. These were people who were adrift, who lacked competence in dealing with situations, who had unsatisfying connections to other people, and who generally were vulnerable to having their psyches manipulated. We knew that Steve was a paragon of competence, someone who always had a solid idea of what he thought about things and about people. What could he expect to get out of the Forum?
The ridicule came fast and furious. “Personally, knowing that I’m beyond the reach of profiteering New Age hucksters gives me all the empowerment, self-actualization, spiritual harmony, and inner quietude that I need,” I wrote. “$325? When you could spend all day masturbating for free?” wrote my friend Christian.
Steve promised he was going only for purposes of intellectual curiosity. His ex-girlfriend Carlyn was a Landmark enthusiast, and to Steve it was worth the money and the time to cut through the preconceptions and find out about it firsthand. When I learned his motivation, I provisionally withdrew my ridicule.
In researching Landmark prior to Steve’s Forum seminar, I learned that it is the current incarnation of est, the 1970’s touchy-feely self-help personality-deconstructing blissed-out zombie training which is related to Scientology. Landmark eschewed some of est’s more controversial practices, apparently in favor of wider marketability. Although Landmark denounces the more overt brainwashing techniques of est — including the confrontation, intimidation, and physiological stress that are also hallmarks of Scientology — I later learned that those methods are in fact still present in the Forum, they’re just toned down for subtlety. Unlike est, the Forum permits you bathroom breaks whenever necessary — but the long days sitting still in uncomfortable chairs under faintly buzzing fluorescent lights still induces physiological stress. The psychologically vicious personal attacks that est employed to make students admit their worldview needed fixing are replaced with a more insidious pressure to conform that comes from the Forum’s large group setting.
In the office on Monday morning, Steve assured us it had been worth every penny. In enthusiastic but frustratingly vague terms, he described what the experience had been like. We tried to nail him down on specifics beyond the simple logistics (lots of people seated together in a large room for many hours over three days), and Steve gamely answered our questions all day long, bringing his considerable powers of articulation to bear on the task of properly conveying what the Forum was all about. But each time we thought we understood him and tried to repeat our understanding back, he’d say, “No, that’s not exactly it.” I didn’t know it then, but it was the beginning of a pattern that continues to this day: no one who’s been through the Forum can satisfactorily describe it.
The best we could get out of him was this: for three days, the charismatic Forum leader energetically delivers a series of connected lectures on limiting factors in human nature — such things as making decisions based on the past rather than on the future one imagines, and failing to really listen when another person is speaking because one feels one already knows what will be said. A great deal of interaction with the audience is involved; the Forum leader challenges one person after another in Socratic fashion to relate short anecdotes about how the topic of the moment relates to his or her life. The multitude of viewpoints is thus delivered at such a pace as to trigger a kind of synergy in the minds of the audience, allowing them to have “breakthroughs” about what has been holding them back in their lives.
Steve admitted that the content per se is nothing more than one could get from a good background in philosophy, or even a good novel. But the unique aspect that made it so effective for him was the participation of so many different people offering so many different outlooks, which audience members mentally “try on” for size at a frenetic pace. He claimed to have had a number of useful breakthroughs. One of the exercises assigned during the few breaks in the Forum is to call someone with whom you have some unresolved issue, and resolve it in the forthright way taught in the class. Steve said this exercise helped him overcome a hurdle in one of his interpersonal relationships.
Another of the exercises is a transparent marketing ploy. Upon returning to real life on the Monday morning after a Forum seminar, the Forum “graduate” is supposed to recruit a number of friends and relatives — a number that the graduate commits to on Sunday night while in the full flush of having completed the Forum — to return with him or her to a Tuesday night wrap-up session. Since most grads’ heads are in too much of a whirl right after the Forum, part of the Tuesday night session’s purpose is to educate their loved ones about what they just underwent with a minimum of excited babbling. Another (openly acknowledged) purpose is to try to sign up new students, and to persuade the old students to sign up for advanced courses. Still another purpose is to top off the weekend’s indoctrination after the grad has had a chance to internalize some of the ideas.
Steve asked me to attend. I didn’t want to; my skepticism about the Forum was not assuaged by Steve’s incoherent enthusiasm. But he persisted, and my enormous respect for Steve made me conclude that there had to be something to it that I was failing to see. For his sake, I broke an earlier Tuesday night engagement and went with Steve.
When we arrived, a little early, we milled about talking to people Steve had met during the course. One fetchingly attired woman declared to Steve, after he complimented her appearance, that before the course, she would never have gone out so daringly dressed. But the course had allowed her to overcome some self-esteem problems she had, and she was able to say “what the hell.”
Good for her, I thought, but self-esteem has never been one of my problems. I felt my preconceptions about the Forum strengthening, not the least reason for which was the blinding sea of beaming Stepford smiles on the faces of the many Forum volunteers ushering people around and handing out literature. Their ultra-friendly demeanors were clearly meant to put people like me at ease, but had exactly the opposite effect. Nevertheless, I reminded myself that responsible skepticism implies being open-minded, and I renewed my resolve to be so.
We took our seats in an auditorium filled with Forum grads and their many “guests,” some three hundred people in all. For a few minutes Steve left me alone while he went to find Leslie, his other guest for the evening.
Distinguishing me by my non-Forum-grad name tag, a fresh grad named Kerry sat down next to me and immediately struck up a conversation. He told me how wonderful he found the Forum to be, and I confessed my skepticism. My problem, I said, is that the things the Forum supposedly encourages one to do — examine one’s behaviors, understand one’s motivations, “inquire” into what it “means to be human” — are all things that I taught myself to do long ago, with perfectly satisfying results. No doubt others who are less introspective than I could derive many benefits from learning such mental disciplines, but as for me, it felt redundant. Kerry assured me that he’d felt just the way I did before the Forum began.
Steve showed up with Leslie around the same time that the session began. The Forum leader, Jack Schrop, a extremely magnetic middle-aged man who was a Navy SEAL commander in Vietnam (and with whom Steve was unabashedly impressed), took the stage and welcomed us. He said a few words about Landmark and the Forum, made a bit of a sales pitch, then invited some of the new grads to take the microphone to describe any breakthroughs they’d had since finishing the course on Sunday night.
Hands shot up all over the room. Jack picked out five or six speakers at a time, three or four times overall. The speakers took turns addressing the auditorium for a few minutes apiece. Most of them credited the Forum for their newfound ability to address such a large group, which before the course they wouldn’t have had the self-confidence to do. (I have no problems speaking in front of large groups, I thought to myself, further convincing myself that the Forum was probably not for me.)
Some of the breakthroughs reported by the new grads were more interesting. One man said the Forum helped him finally sever his ties with some old drug-dealing buddies. A woman described breaking through a twenty-year impasse in her relationship with her mother. One shy, introverted systems analyst found himself gabbing to everyone in sight when he went to work Monday morning. A man who’d been avoiding a difficult issue with a close friend finally aired it, ending the friendship but giving him closure. And on and on.
Jack interjected various comments throughout the unrehearsed testimonials. He explained how he got involved with the Forum, acknowledged the concerns of those (like me) who found the shining happy people of the Forum to be a little creepy and disconcerting, and sprinkled some Forum philosophy here and there. “We promise breakthroughs,” he said. “We offer the design principles of humanity,” he also said. “We don’t solve your individual problems; you do that.”
At one point, he offered a sample pithy Forum insight “for free”: “If you’re afraid that people think a certain thing about you — if they stop talking when you walk by an open office door — don’t worry: they do. They think the same things about you that you think about them. So what? That’s all.”
At one point, Jack Schrop asked all the guests to turn to their respective hosts and ask two questions: “Do you want me to enroll in the Forum?” and “Why?” Leslie and I did as instructed, asking Steve the two questions, and Steve replied “Yes” and “Because I think you’ll derive benefits from it,” which he briefly described in terms we’d already been discussing.
I told him that I was increasingly eager to be persuaded, but so far, no go. I repeated to him the business about how I’m already introspective, how I already solve my own problems in ways that sound like what the Forum people are talking about, and so on. I also assured him that, as skeptical as I was about the Forum, I was at least as skeptical about my own claims of being so well-adjusted. In other words, I was open to the possibility that I don’t cope with my problems as well as I think I do. Open to the possibility, but not convinced of it.
Apart from that, I said, there was the matter of not having a spare $325 to throw around.
Eventually, Jack Schrop announced that the guests would be divided into four smaller groups and led into separate rooms (to hear the Forum marketing pitch), while the new grads attended a special session of their own. But first, interested guests were invited to sign up for future Forum sessions, with the $325 tuition payable on the spot (of which all but $50 was refundable). A large handful of guests did sign up; then we broke up into the smaller group sessions.
The leader of my group was a distressingly enthusiastic fellow named Curt. He began by reiterating much of what Jack had said, particularly that the Forum promises “breakthroughs,” especially in the areas of “power” and “freedom.” Then he painted some scenarios that most people can probably identify with (not me, though). For example, he asked how many people felt their boss at work limits their self-expression? Dozens of hands went up. Who felt that they let life happen to them instead of making it happen? Again, dozens. Who ever made a New Year’s resolution they didn’t keep? Etc.
Curt explained that most of us allow our futures to be determined by our pasts; we get stuck in behavioral ruts that, after a while, we don’t question or revise. What Forum helps you to do, he said, is to take your past out of your future and put it into the past where it belongs. That leaves nothing in your future, which is as it should be; the future is what you make it.
This message all sounded fine to me, even if the setting and the messenger were a little off-putting, but again, it was nothing that I hadn’t already discovered from years of learning, living, and reflecting. As he kept talking about more and more of the same kinds of things, I began to feel pretty impressed with myself; was I the only one who had discovered these “secrets” for himself?
The session with Curt was highly interactive, with guests asking questions or responding to prompting by Curt. He worked the group well; after not much time had passed, several of the guests began spouting the kind of psychobabble that they believed was expected in response to his prompts. For example, while discussing one guest’s predisposition toward failure in many aspects of his life, Curt uncovered some detail of that guest’s self-destructive habits. When he asked why the guest didn’t simply discard that detail from his life, the guest obliged with, “It helps me maintain my self-image as a failure.” Whenever someone played into Curt’s hand in this way, he responded with a smarmy, “Yes! Thank you! Fabulous!”
We took a break and milled about for a bit. Interested guests again were invited to register for future Forum sessions, and at least half the room signed up on the spot. Meanwhile, Curt singled me out and struck up a conversation, no doubt sensing that I was a holdout. I explained my skepticism to him in much the same way I explained it to Kerry and to Steve. Curt deflected my objections by pointing out that only by taking the course could I discover whether I could derive any benefit from it.
I had other concerns, though. “Lots of people seem to act pretty cultish about the Forum, frankly,” I said. “When I have revelatory insights into myself, I don’t give the credit to the latest book I’ve read or to any other one thing; the credit belongs to me, the sum of all of my experiences. But Forum grads can’t stop talking about how it’s the Forum, not themselves, that changed their lives.”
Curt said that some participants’ cultishness about the Forum was a problem, because it was off-putting to others, but he said that I seemed to have the right attitude about it and he hoped I’d consider signing up.
The small group session continued in the same vein for a little while longer, then the evening was over.
I did not sign up to take the course.
A few days later, Steve announced, to the astonishment of everyone, that he would be attending the “advanced course,” the next step in Landmark’s curriculum (and twice as expensive as the Forum). The astonishment came from the fact that Steve had earlier said he would not take any other Landmark courses, now that he’d had the firsthand Forum experience he was after.
“It’s brainwashing!” we declared. “Can’t you see? You’d resolved not to give them any more of your money. Now you’re going to do it in spite of yourself.” Steve insisted he’d made the decision on his own because he expected to get more out of it than he put into it.
He returned from that course with a detailed personal agenda based on what he’d learned about “commitment.” He was through with caffeine and tobacco, he said. And he vowed to put an end to his absent-mindedness with the help of a pocket calendar, in which he thenceforth religiously inscribed even the tiniest appointments and duties.
(Steve’s absent-mindedness about sometimes very important things is well-known among his friends. On more than one occasion, for instance, he’s left people stranded, waiting for a lift from him that he’d promised and then completely forgotten about. A regrettable character flaw, but that didn’t detract from his charm. Paradoxically, it added to it.)
In his capacity as president of Zanshin, Steve’s Landmark training appeared to have some beneficial effects. Repeatedly he kept us moving forward by asserting total disinterest in the past — in why or how we had made some error or failed to meet some deadline. All that interested him was what we had in mind for the future. This was a liberating way to think.
On the other hand, Steve started to become more involved with Landmark. He began volunteering for administrative tasks surrounding the Forum and other Landmark activities. He took more courses. He trained to produce seminars of his own.
This started to become distasteful to some of the rest of us. “Doesn’t it bother you that a lucrative for-profit company is exploiting your uncompensated volunteer labor (and that of thousands of others)?” No, said Steve. He continued to believe he was getting more out of it than he was putting in, learning useful skills and making valuable new contacts.
Well, it bothered us, and discussion with Steve about Landmark-related matters tapered off. He continued to give time and money to Landmark, while the rest of us would sometimes discuss our frustration and worry — and confusion about what Steve thought he could be getting out of it. After all, once the blush of the first few months had worn off, Steve was back on cigarettes and coffee, and was occasionally committing appalling acts of absent-mindedness.
Steve continued trying to recruit others in our circle, and one of our friends, Pat, actually attended a Forum seminar — returning completely unimpressed. In an agony of puzzlement about the thrall in which Landmark held Steve — as undeceivable a fellow as any I know — I attended another Tuesday night session with him and with fellow skeptic Greg, this one with a slightly different agenda from the first Tuesday night session I went to. Greg and I felt we got a good understanding of the Forum, but were unmoved.
This remains the central mystery of my life.
The year of living Googley
Today is the first anniversary of my coming to work at Google.
It’s been a good year. Google is a great place to work, as you may have heard, but the perks are just a small part of it. Mainly it’s the energizing work culture and being surrounded by lots of really bright folks in a company that (forgive me for having drunk the Kool-Aid) cares — really — about improving the world in its pursuit of profits.
But Google can also be a frustrating place to work, and it’s not for everyone. The culture requires employees to be a lot more self-directed than elsewhere, and those who rely on a more traditional manager-employee structure can find themselves at sea. While still at Danger I knew a few people who burned out quickly at Google for this very reason and so I almost didn’t accept Google’s job offer.
I don’t want to sound too self-congratulatory, especially in the current poor job market, but at that time I was lucky enough to be entertaining a few different job offers. They ultimately came down to Google and Apple, and for a while, Apple was looking like a lock.
It would have been quite a haul for me — it’s a 75-minute drive to Cupertino, or more than two hours on bad traffic days. But Apple had the edge in most other ways. For one thing, I’d be working with the prestigious iPhone team, where I’d be an instant expert, since I’d just spent five and a half years working on one of the iPhone’s direct predecessors. Google, by contrast, wouldn’t even tell me in advance what I’d be working on; just that if I accepted their offer, they’d put me where they thought I was most needed and would do the best. Apple’s tenacious recruiter kept sweetening the deal every time I wavered (out of genuine indecision, not some sort of cutthroat negotiating skill). The folks I interviewed with at Apple talked about how involved “Steve” was with the iPhone team, making sure I was good and starstruck. There was the personal satisfaction of being sought-after by a company that had turned me away many years earlier. And as for the long commute — well, if Google stationed me at their Mountain View headquarters, that was almost as far; and both Google and Apple had employee shuttle buses that I could ride from San Francisco.
I mulled my options during a visit to New York last April. And that’s when it dawned on me:
- To keep in contact with the two companies during my trip, I switched from my home e-mail account (which it’s hard to access remotely) to Google’s Gmail;
- To find my way to my various interviews, I used Google Maps;
- To compare the values of my respective job offers, I used a Google Spreadsheet;
- To learn more about the senior Apple executives I’d met and would be working with, I Googled them.
I never even touched an Apple product, not once. The choice was clear: if I wanted to have the biggest possible impact (and I did), I had to join Google.
Google placed me at YouTube. On the one hand, that was good: YouTube’s offices in San Bruno were much less distant than the main “Googleplex” in Mountain View. On the other hand, I was disappointed: to me YouTube was an online toy of little consequence, and my initial project was to make not-very-consequential tweaks to an already-mostly-finished part of it. I read the internal mailing lists with envy about the cooler projects underway in Mountain View and Google’s many other offices.
But I needn’t have worried. Almost immediately, the prestige of working at YouTube went up (in my mind, at least) as YouTube transformed unexpectedly from the place for funny cat videos to a tool for social change. That very summer, the presidential election became known as “the YouTube election”! And I moved to a project at the interface of technology and public policy, where a lot of new engineering awaited my talents, and I became very engaged.
At the same time, Google itself (partly in the form of some of my old Danger colleagues) produced a mobile-phone platform that’s cooler than the iPhone, while “Steve” disappeared from Apple for mysterious health reasons. The entire media landscape is now tipping in the direction of online video and I once again find myself accidentally near the center of the zeitgeist.
The Soreness of the Gams
In high school I fancied myself an accomplished bike rider, zipping nimbly through the streets of New York like Kevin Bacon. But when I moved to hilly, hilly Pittsburgh for college I biked a lot less; and when I got a car I biked less than that; and when a car hit me and and mangled my bike (an incident that led to my first meeting with Andrea — “and now that woman is my wife”) I stopped altogether.
I grew more and more marshmallowy. Finally, after moving to California, I replaced my bike and took it on a few short rides a year, always intending some day to do serious riding but never managing to. Meanwhile my cycling friends would talk about a casual 20-mile ride they did, up and down steep hills; my biggest ride could not have been more than 10 miles on relatively flat terrain. Once in a while I’d hear about a 50- or 100-mile ride they did. I’d drive to work along the coastal route and see intrepid cyclists pedaling up and up and up the long climb to the top of Skyline Boulevard and wonder (a) whether I could do that too and (b) what it would feel like to speed down an endless hill like that after investing the effort to climb it.
Then I heard about Bike to Work Day and thought, this is my opportunity to try a long ride. At my last few jobs I worked variously 60 and 50 miles from home. All it would take is a little training before the day came and I would finally show myself and the world that I was still a cycling force to be reckoned with. But year after year one thing or another prevented me from participating: a newborn; an injury; another newborn; illness; a dying mother; surgery.
Finally, this year, I had no excuse — other than the weather and the usual craziness of April preventing me from doing any training. At all. But conditions otherwise were exactly right, especially the fact that I’m working closer to home (35 miles) than I have in eight years.
I planned my route and I set off with considerable trepidation. The ride ahead was longer by far than any I had attempted; it included several big climbs, any one of which had the potential to reduce me to tears, nausea, or unconsciousness; and my body was about as marshmallowy as it had ever been. But (to make a long story short) I made it! Albeit with considerable pain — it hurts even to be typing this up now.
Here are some observations from this experience:
- Do not forget sunscreen; take it from someone who learned the hard way. As if sore, frozen muscles weren’t bad enough. Ow, ow, ow.
- If you keep really well hydrated, as you should and as I did, you will endure much better than I did the time I tried just one of the climbs in yesterday’s ride without proper hydration and passed out. But after your ride, your kidneys will realize there is a giant surplus of water in your bloodstream and will wring it out into your bladder again, and again, and again, and again…
- Why in the world is the shoulder of Skyline Boulevard strewn with so many discarded women’s shoes? And why are they all white? Hypothesis: new brides fling them from their Just Married vehicles; or possibly new divorcees ritualistically discard them along with other mementos of that no-good bastard. Do women do that? Is that a thing?
Naturally, as I rode I had my mobile phone with me, expecting to call Andrea for a rescue that it turned out I never needed. I also used it to tweet updates from the road. For posterity, here are yesterday’s tweets from my Twitter feed.
Finally hitting the road about an hour late. Here goes nothing…
Top of Mt Stinky (Andersen @ Sir Francis Drake), 1st climb of the day. Feelin’ good…
Off w the outer layer. Time to rock my Google bike jersey, showcasing my gut nicely.
About to tackle Horse Hill, a 90-degree vertical climb. (Well, almost.) Kills me dead every time.
Top of Horse Hill! Only mostly dead. Now a glorious descent into Mill Valley.
N. end of Bridgeway in Sausalito. Mill Valley was flat, smooth, and gorgeous.
Big shout-out to wife Andrea, taking on a lot today to make this ride possible. I love her.
Pausing to admire million-dollar view of San Francisco from S. end of Bridgeway.
Next: big climb to Golden Gate bridge. It once made me faint. I fear it.
Golden Gate bridge, yeah!! Suck it, earlier, wimpier version of me.
It’s amazing how good Clif bars taste when you need them, considering how bad they taste when you don’t.
Biking across the Golden Gate: a feast for the eyes, a bludgeoning assault for the ears.
Legion of Honor. Forgot about the killer climb to get here. gasp, gasp
Legs weakening. Butt sore — so sore. But onward! Next stop: the beach.
Back at sea level. All that hard-won potential energy, gone. (But thrillingly spent — whee!)
Butt soreness becoming critical. Cannot maintain a steady cadence.
Taking a break on Great Highway near Sloat.
Facing the endless Skyline climb — the most daunting part of this ride even before all the soreness.
Chain-ring print on right calf: check.
In San Mateo county. Made it all the way through S.F.! Whatever else happens, they can’t take that away from me.
3.4 miles remaining in Skyline climb. Pain does not exist in this dojo!
On my last water bottle. 1.6mi remaining in Skyline climb.
Skyline climb: done! All downhill from here. (Except the remaining uphill parts.)
Just 3.6 miles left! But I can barely move…
Top of Sneath Lane. Now it really is all downhill from here!
Made it. Fuckin’ made it! I am, I am, I am Superman, and I can do anything.