Google Days

For a number of people working with the web, myself included, Google will be pretty high up the list of dream companies to work for.

When you see descriptions of their company culture and offices it all sounds too good to be true. Free food, no dress code, subsidised massages and a commitment to allowing people to spend 20% of their work time on 'personal' projects. Their offices look gorgeous and they have a very strong commitment to green issues.. Forbes named them Best Company to Work For this year.

I think there's a lot to learn from their attitudes. Of course not everybody has the available funds and scale that they do, but there are elements of their work culture that just about everybody can learn from.

Of course, if you're a somewhat bitter competitor who's been losing current and potential employees to the offer of a free lunch, there's even more reason to try and do better. But apparently if you're Microsoft rather than try to improve yourselves, you just try and criticise the competition. When they're recruiting young graduates, do they really think that being able to say "our health insurance policy is better than Google's" is going to work? No, they're going to look at the pictures of the funky office, grinning staff members and exciting projects and be sold on them.

Make changes to your ways of working, make your staff happy and then show the world. Criticising the competition is just... tacky.