Google: Why would anyone ever leave?

Jade Chang at Metropolis Magazine has a fun article on the work environment at Google. An excerpt:

Corin Anderson does not work like most of the world: his office is a glass tent, which he shares with two other people. His desk hides behind a complex Rube Goldberg-esque maze, built by Anderson out of a toy called the Chaos Tower, a sort of theme park for marbles.

Each day he sits in the midst of figurines, Legos, and stuffed animals, eyes fixed on his computer screen and earphones strapped on, for hours at a stretch. When he wants a snack, he walks to the fully stocked micro-kitchen, maybe breaking open a bag of organic potato chips or grabbing a handful of trail mix. Twenty percent of the time -- with his employer's full approval -- he works on projects of his own devising that are only tangentially related to his job.

And strangest of all, come nightfall he often has no desire to go home, preferring to get dinner, gratis, in one of the employee cafes.

Beautiful. Why would anyone ever leave?

By the way, it is fun to bump into Corin Anderson again. Corey was at University of Washington in the PhD program (he finished, I did not) in computer science around the same time I was. He started in graphics and then did some interesting research work in personalization.

[via Matt Marshall]