Seattle Times: The lure of great Google perks

Brier Dudley, columnist from the Seattle Times, visited our Kirkland office earlier this week to check out the Google culture and see where we're heading. His story about his visit contains some great quotes from Kirkland engineers on what it's like to work here:

"My theory is none of this is real and we all went to programmer heaven," [Google engineer Steve] Yegge said.

"I think that every 10 years there's a place to work," he explained. "It was Microsoft in the 1990s, arguably Apple in the '80s. ... Google is that Mecca right now."

Being such a great place to work has definitely helped with recruiting. We've grown substantially since I started 8 months ago, and it looks like this trend is expected to continue.

Managers said they haven't seen a drop in applications and they have authority to hire as many smart people as they can find [...] Google's local engineering group is up to 400; within five years it should have "a couple of thousand employees" in the area.

Brier also enjoyed his Google lunch so much that he wrote a separate column with a review of the food.