Doug Edwards, the author of I’m feeling lucky: Confessions of Google employee no. 59, told in an interview that in its early days of Google, when the people didn’t understand what the company was doing, Larry Page, co-founder of Google would ask his employees to “Play it louder” just like Bob Dylan did for ‘Judas’. Edward told that the modus operandi of Google back in those days was to take out an idea and implement it, even if people keep shouting at you that it is wrong, because you know that what you are doing is right.

This Maverick of an approach helped Google to reduce its operating costs significantly by cramming up a datacentre room that usually held 50 machines, with 1500 servers. During the six year tenure of Edwards in Google, the best moment that tells us about the company’s thinking of never putting limits to what you can achieve was to say yes to Yahoo’s offer to provide search results to it. This meant a complete overhaul of the structure of the company to handle the tenfold traffic of Yahoo which was far superior to Google at that time. Edwards also tells about the world famous perks of working at Google which included company carwash, company doctor, Masseurs, free lunch, dinner and breakfast, sweets and what not.

This was chiefly because working in the company meant that you are committed to it 24/7. And the strategy was to devote as much time possible in projects. So if you don’t have to go out for doctors, carwash, food etc you save a vast amount of time and put that on various company oriented jobs. What Google tried to do is remove the detours from your life that slow you down in your journey to achieving your goals. Before starting, learning everything afresh is what Edwards learnt in Google, going against the conventional wisdom is what propels Google ahead of others.

The biggest frustration from the job that Edwards had to face was the serious inability of the co-founders to explain things to the employees. Edwards says that he always felt Larry and Sergey to be the ones who think it was not worth their time to put any effort in explaining things to him or others. Edwards says that Google wasn’t the easiest company to work for but, it was the only company where serious meetings would be interrupted by co-founders to discuss about space tethers! Thus life was never dull at Goolge.