996

One thing I appreciated at early Google (2001) was how folks mostly worked normal hours. Roughly 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Maybe a bit longer if you wanted to stay for the free dinner. Maybe you checked email at home in the evening or had a week of being on call. But in general the company did just fine on a humane schedule.

(There were exceptions, particularly the product folks working on early AdWords partnerships. But even in ads most of the engineers kept to more regular hours. I certainly did.)

I think that reasonable hours are still the norm at much of Google.

I worked there as a SWE for over decade before I left last year. I never once felt pressured to work long hours or extra days. I do recall several times when management folks emphasized that if you're working long hours, it's a sign that something went wrong in our planning, and we should look into it. The few times I stayed late for dinner, the office was mostly empty.

I understand that others may have had a different experience, but for me Google was way healthier than any previous company I have worked at over my decades-long career, including the two companies that I started myself.

Early Google varied a lot. There were a lot of fires in those days that required long hours by engineers. Jeff Dean received a little statue IIRC for taking part in the "index wars", where due to a pervasive lack of checkpointing in the indexing pipeline they had been unable to push a new index to prod for months. And Lucas Pereira regularly had to ship new indexes to the east coast by loading them into his car then driving across the USA.

It's also easy to forget that Google established product-market fit in an uncompetitive market immediately, then found a cash geyser business model only about six months later (or rather copied it from Inktomi). They didn't need to work crazy hours because web search was viewed as a dead end problem that didn't make money, so nobody was chasing their tail. Google's early culture of strict secrecy was a direct consequence of this strange birth: if anyone had found out earlier how much demand existed for AdWords they'd have faced much harsher competition much faster. But Google swore everyone to absolute secrecy, and so the first time the industry discovered how valuable search is was in 2004 on the day of the Google IPO. By then Google had invested so much in R&D that it was impossible to catch up.

Very few companies can be compared to early Google, unfortunately.