Xooglers is written by Doug Edwards, an ex-Googler who was the Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management at Google during 1999-2005. Doug's writing is unbelievably addictive as he started to reminisce about his experiences at Google.
Although I've only been at Google for less than a year, a lot of the stories that he has written so far truly resemble Google's culture today. I think many readers who don't work at Google will find his site very entertaining as well.
Here's a snipplet from one of his entries where he recounts his job interview with Google's co-founder Sergey Brin:
When Sergey showed up, . . . he was wearing gym shorts, a tee shirt and inline skates. He had obviously been playing hard. I'd known better than to wear a tie, but he took office casual to a new level. I sat back and began toying with one of the rubber balls, feeling so relaxed that I accidentally removed its stopper, causing half the air inside to rush out with a hiss. Sergey seemed to find that amusing. He quickly pored over my resume, and began peppering me with questions. "What kind of marketing did you do that was most effective?" "What metrics did you use to measure it?" "What types of viral marketing did you do?" "What was your GPA?" I was doing fine until that last one. I just looked at him."My GPA?" I asked. I hadn't thought about my GPA since the day they handed me my diploma in 1981. And given that Brown allowed me to take as many classes as I wanted with a pass/fail option, I'm not sure I ever knew what my GPA was. . . .But that was not Sergey's hard question. He saved that for last.
I'm going to give you five minutes," he told me. "When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don't already know." He then rolled out of the room toward the snack area. . . . I found out later that he asked almost everyone to do this, so if a candidate wasn't hired, at least it wasn't a total waste of his time.
