Inside Google Zurich

It's sort of Google's tenth anniversary this week: ten years ago, on 15 September 1997, Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the google.com domain name (the company would be incorporated only one year later).

Yesterday I visited Google's Swiss research center in Zurich with a group of colleagues from the Internet Briefing -- a knowledge-sharing and networking organization run by entrepreneur Reto Hartinger. (The picture above shows Google's mailbox: notice the tasty paradox of the small black sticker in the middle, it says: "No advertising"... Harbinger of things to come in websearch?). It's not common that Google lets people in; it's common that they make you sign a non-disclosure agreement as soon as you show up at the reception desk (they did); it's also common that they don't tell you anything sensitive anyway (they didn't); and I had to submit this post to their communication office before publication.

But it was a good opportunity to gain a sense of the place and the people who work there -- some 360 or so, from 50-plus nationalities, almost 300 of whom engineers (the others are in sales and operations). Zurich, established in April 2004, is nowadays the most important research base for Google in Europe, where it has 12 centers. It draws staffers from the Swiss federal institutes of technology (ETH and EPFL) but also from dozens of other countries (Zurich is a great place to live). The two nondescript buildings that host Google, just minutes away from the Swiss main banking and finance district, feature all the usual Google amenities: free drinks and snacks, foosball tables (the Swiss have a reputation within the company for being good at it), flyers announcing that "you're entering a code-of-conduct-free zone" or telling you to "remember to turn off your computer and screen when you're not using it" or offering German lessons (paid for by the company). Brand new "Google Bikes" are squeezed into corridors (Zurich is a bike-friendly city). The spaces are crowded (here, too, Google is hiring so fast that a new building -- a former brewery -- a few blocks away, that was supposed to host the whole crew in a couple of months' time, is already full) but the environment is silent: engineers programming.

This, after all, as everybody wearing a G badge keeps reminding you, is an engineering-driven company.

What do they do? The Zurich team is strong in all things maps and geo, even more so after having integrated several dozen specialists from Swiss company Endoxon, which Google acquired last year. So there is alot of work here going into Google Maps and Google Earth -- the built-in flight simulator discovered by a blogger a few weeks ago was developed here. But they also work on "search quality" (perfecting search results), "click quality" (keeping out advertising spam), on the user experience, on Gmail and other applications, and on the infrastructure. But, explained our guide Matthew Worby, pretty much every office works on bits and pieces of pretty much everything. Spreading the centers "makes it easier to hire as fast as we need", he said, pointing to the next expansion of an office in Munich, Germany. Also, building up too large a presence in a single city could dry up the local talent market.

We got two speeches. David Harper discussed Google Gadgets and the iGoogle personalized homepage.

Bernhard Seefeld then (using the just-released Google Presentations, their online competitor to MS' PowerPoint) described the ten principles of Google engineering/software development:

1. Single-source code repository for all Google code (G has a rather big repository, and all engineers have access to the source code)
2. Developers can checkin fixes for any Google product (an "open-source" approach)
3. You can build any Google product in three steps (get, configure, make)
4. Uniform coding standards (how should code "look") across the company
5. Mandatory code reviews before checkin (if a developer fixes a bug in Gmail, the fix needs to be approved by the Gmail team)
6. Pervasive unit testing (a "unit" is the smallest testable part of a program; unit testing validates that it works properly)
7. Test run continuously, emails get sent (automatically) to developers if any failure is spotted
8. Powerful tools that are shared companywide
9. Rapid project-cycles, developers change projects often, and can devote 20% of their time to pursuing whatever idea/project they want (if it gets somewhere, Google will then throw some more engineers at it and turn it into a product or a feature)
10. Peer-driven review process, flat management hierarchy

(If you're into lists, check out the "Ten things Google has found to be true" on their corporate site.)

Despite having 12'300 employees worldwide, Google has managed to maintaint a startup feeling, and I've the impression most of it descends from the obsessive communication and information-sharing between and among employees. In Seefeld's words: "We are the real power users of Gmail".