The employees, called Googlers, are very friendly…almost too friendly. When they are having a good day they like to call it feeling Googley.  They call new employees Nooglers and make them wear beanies to ensure everyone knows they are new to the company! Sensing a pattern here? They have found a variation of the word Google for almost everything. There is even an engineer whose official title is “Jolly Good Fellow”.

They have multiple campuses in Mountain View and we had the pleasure of training in their primary office on day one.  This building was not built buy Google but it was given a Google facelift. They are very adamant when you are in the buildings that you are accompanied by a Googler.  They do not allow pictures to be taken inside but as you can see we broke that rule but only in the lobby.

The office spaces are pretty cool but not Uber sweet. Everything from the stone and hard wood floors to the walls and furniture are lightly colored giving it a bright and cheery atmosphere. There was no evident pattern for offices or cube layouts. Some people were crammed three to an office and others had very spacious cubicles. The coolest things about the offices are the portable conference rooms. Yes I said it, portable conference rooms. They are made of very light canvas-like material and had plastic for the windows.

A few of the other amenities are the on-site Laundromat, dry cleaner, post office, and they even have a mobile haircut van that visits once a week. This place is definitely set up to accommodate the engineers and programmers that have dedicated their life to the company. The only thing they don’t have is a place for people to nap outside of the massage chairs that are located in every lobby on the campus.

In one of the lobbies on the main campus we saw the very first Google server. It was a makeshift rack that had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 jerry-rigged servers all crammed in separated by a layer of cork board. I guess you have to start somewhere. As far as workstations go there was a combination of darn near every computer on the planet. I saw a lot of PC and Mac laptops throughout the offices as well as the Linux desktops that are the preferred machine for engineers.