— Clearly, this isn’t the typical American workplace.
Just inside the sleek glass doors of YouTube’s corporate headquarters is a rock-climbing wall — “for Googlers only.” Straight ahead, five guys in T-shirts and jeans cluster around a foosball table, engrossed in a lunch-hour game. Nearby, a Russian film crew jabbers away, shooting footage for a documentary on the global company. At the reception desk, the candy jar is a big, red, furry head of Sesame Street’s Elmo, watched over by the receptionist’s tiny, quivering Chihuahua, which definitely isn’t stuffed.
And that’s just the lobby.
From the standard attire — jeans and T-shirts, mostly — to the indoor putting green, the outdoor Frisbee golf course and the gourmet cafe dishing up free fare all day, YouTube is more akin to summer camp for adults.
YouTube and Google, its parent company in nearby Mountain View, are two of Silicon Valley’s hotbeds of hiring. Jobs here are some of the most coveted.
“Google has an incredible amount of cachet. They offer benefits that blow away the competition,” said Dawn Block, a veteran Silicon Valley technology jobs headhunter.
Behind all the perks and quirks, there’s a serious business. Google is a $170 billion global empire spanning more than 40 countries, with offices from Madrid to Mumbai, India. Having morphed far beyond its Internet search engine roots, Google’s business brawn has attracted antitrust scrutiny in this country and abroad.
But the atmosphere inside its smaller YouTube subsidiary more closely resembles that of a young startup.
To find out what it’s like to land a job and work at one of the hippest and most hard-charging companies in California, we recently spent an afternoon on YouTube’s campus. Our hosts: Christopher Dale and Josh Sassoon, 30-somethings who took “meandering paths” to their Google jobs.
Dale, 36, is a corporate communications manager who toggles between the Google and YouTube campuses.
Growing up, Dale expected to become a lawyer, but an uninspiring summer job at a New York law firm stamped out that desire. Instead, armed with an English literature degree from Colgate University and a master’s from Cambridge, Dale landed in San Francisco at a high-tech public relations firm where he merged his two passions: writing and technology.
He arrived in 2000, just in time for the dot-com debacle. His employer went bankrupt; Dale survived by starting his own marketing firm and then joining a tech-focused PR agency. All the while, he kept hearing “all these cool things this company called Google was doing.”
In 2007, Dale got an unsolicited email from a Google recruiter on LinkedIn. The interview process was “rigorous” and stretched over several months. Hired to handle global crisis communications and public affairs, Dale has been at Google for three years and is known for his “anti-uniform” of hipster eyeglasses, white shirt and, yes, a tie.
Sassoon, 30, is a “user-experience designer,” which means he helps YouTube’s engineering team design new features such as Cosmic Panda, where users gather and “curate” favorite videos, channels and playlists.
After graduating from high school, Sassoon majored in art history at the University of California at Los Angeles. He interned at a local architecture firm, where he developed a passion for visual design, and at Intel, where he taught himself the technology.
By the end of college, he was creating websites for small companies, which led to jobs in New York at MySpace and at Sony Music, where he designed more than 200 websites for performers from Jennifer Lopez to Adam Lambert from “American Idol.” Last year, Sassoon was wooed back to California by Apple, which hired him as a visual designer.
It wasn’t a good fit. Despite being a huge fan of Apple’s user-friendly technology and sleek products, he found its corporate culture too stuffy.
“It’s a very top-down company with a singular vision. That’s just the way it’s structured.”
He stayed less than a year before “finding my fit” at YouTube. Hired six months ago, Sassoon is a “NuTuber,” the YouTube vernacular for new employees. (At Google, they’re called “Nooglers.”)
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Google’s work environment is not for wimps, said Patti Wilson, a longtime Silicon Valley executive coach. For instance, she said, employee performance reviews are quarterly and available for peers to review.
“On one level, that’s really egalitarian and shows no favoritism,” she said. “On another level, you’re held accountable on a very high level for getting your job done. It’s not for the faint of heart who don’t want to work hard.”
About 3,000 applications a day come in to Google. Job candidates typically go through four interviews, with potential managers and peers. The company prides itself on asking tough questions “that test your ability to think on your feet and … (react) to stuff on the fly,” Dale said.
Google doesn’t disclose employee salaries or stock options. There are traditional benefits: an employer-matching 401(k) plan, health care, child care.
And there are the offbeat perks, such as free bicycles or Razor scooters to glide along the sunlit office corridors. Guest speakers are common: A Buddhist monk spoke recently. Before that, it was songstresses Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. There’s a thatched “You Tiki” bar where staffers whip up occasional after-work cocktails.
The company’s gourmet — and free — cafes are famous. Not surprisingly, Dale said, most employees rarely drift off campus for lunch.
“By keeping employees here and talking about ideas … a lunch conversation could lead to Gmail or some other Google innovation,” Dale said.
Despite making work a place you’d seemingly never want to leave, Dale said, there’s a big emphasis on “work/life balance.” On weekends, his boss believes in turning off the cellphone and emails unless it’s an emergency.
“Weekends are for spending with your family,” said Dale, a married father of two who hops the free Google shuttle van from San Francisco each morning.
Sitting in a conference room where concepts are scribbled all over whiteboards, Sassoon said: “Here, every week, every single person at every level can contribute something. That’s a very exciting environment.”
So enticing, in fact, he said he and his technical colleagues don’t want to miss a day at the office. The feeling is so pervasive there’s a Google term for it: “FOMO” or Fear of Missing Out.
Asked whether it all doesn’t sound a bit cultlike, Dale laughed.
“It would be if we all weren’t so disheveled, nerdy and … Googley. We’re all just really passionate about what we’re doing.”