blogging.vc

Via good old Slashdot I found this article at InformationWeek about Google’s inner workings. While it mostly focuses on IT it sheds a bit of light on some of the company’s quite distinctive solutions to typical issues of corporate life such as performance reporting for employees:

“Performance reviews are handled in a similarly technocratic way. Google’s “Perf” system lets managers write e-mails–again read by a computer before any human–describing what a worker did on a project that was good or bad. Come review time, peers get an e-mail asking to compare the employee to other Google people. Perf breaks up the answers, measures who’s being compared with whom, and–get this–makes the answers public. The way Merrill figures it, techies like open-air back patting. Presumably, the process airs some dirty laundry, too, but Merrill says that would happen anyway. “We have to protect our culture as we’re growing fast,” he says. “That’s what keeps us up nights.”

Duh, not sure I really understand what this means, but it sure sounds different…but hey, if all you care about when it comes to Google is gaming their PageRank algorithm to boost your page’s ranking, here you can go for some more serious reading.