Insight into the Google Machine

Cringely has a remarkable (and short) profile of how the Googleplex works. Ideas that clearly wouldn't work for most companies/markets but are fascinating to consider. A few highlights:

• "Peer review at the heart of everything" (up to 20% of an employee's time)
• "Most decisions seem to be reached through a combination of peer review-driven concensus and literal popularity polls"
• "Process is s-l-o-w but the code is clean"
  
• "Google developers outnumber testers by 50-to-1"
• "Typical Google manager has 50-60 direct reports and has time for nothing but meeting after meeting"
• "Developers bid for what they want to do with their time. If there’s a big job to be done people commit to parts of it. And the parts nobody commits to do? They don’t get done."
• "There is no marketing input. Effectively, there is no marketing."
• "Google isn’t a software company at all. It’s an advertising company."