What everyone ought to know about working for Google

Google has been voted the best company to work for in 2008 according to fortune magazine, so I thought I would look at some of the neat and kooky things they provide to keep their employees happy and content.

1. Free Food
Who doesn’t like free food? Well Google employees are very well fed and the company even has a rule that an employee cannot be further than 100 ft away from food. This means that as well as restaurants and cafes with individual sous chefs, there are snack stations dotted around the complex for employees to grab something during their working day.

2. Grand Entrances to the complex
The main entrance to the Googleplex has an enormous staircase made out of Brazilian Hardwood and in the entrance to the New York headquarters is a giant lego logo made by a certified Lego designer.

3. Clubs for Employees
Google attracts a lot of its work force to jobs with its range of club offerings. Much like how universities offer clubs for various interests and activities, Google runs clubs for Sex, Race and sexual preferences.

4. Practical Jokes
Google is known as a fun place to work and this is shown in its tradition for elaborate pranks it plays on employees and users every April 1st. These jokes haven included fake job opportunities (positions on the moon) to fake Google branded drinks. This backfired when they launched Gmail on April 1st in 2004 and many people believed it was a hoax.

5. Green standards
The company uses many concepts as part of its “green” policy, that includes solar panels, complimentary public transport and recycled carpets. The latest part of this to be used is the air filtering system installed in the company’s mountain view campus that creates a cleaner air within the complex.

6. Google social networking
The intranet system that the company uses, called Moma provides all the usual corporate information that you would expect but also has functions that allows it to be used as a “facebook” type application, enabling employees to communicate with each other.

7. Child services
While your children maybe to young to work for Google, the company does have some great benefits for parents. This includes mums getting up to 18 weeks of paid maternity leave and dads get seven weeks.

8. Movie nights
Another perk of being a Google employee is events where the company will rent out a whole cinema to show a blockbuster film before its released. As if you weren’t mr popular already the company allows you to bring a guest.

9. Green transport
You may have seen the pictures from a while back where Google employees would use Segways to get around the campus, but these kept breaking down. They also tried electric scooters for a while, but the employees kept falling off, so now Google has gone old school and provided push bikes to get around on, which also keeps in with their green policy.

10. Tech support
In most jobs people find tech support to be rude obnoxious geeky people who will treat you as if you are an idiot if anything dares go wrong and that is after spending hours waiting for them to come and look at the problem. Well at Google, they have strategically placed Tech Stops, which are small drop in points where friendly staff will try and solve your problem with a smile.

This article was written on behalf of Martin Ward Anderson who deal with accountancy jobs and banking jobs