Google - The Global Start-Up

Google, the winner of the Best Companies to Work For Survey is all about achieving ambitious targets.

- Goutam Das

Anand Rangarajan joined Google in 2008, at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. For the next five years, he worked on Gmail and YouTube. When he moved to Bangalore (he works on Search products now), many looking to relocate from the United States couldn’t stop asking him about the difference between the headquarters and Bangalore, a city with Google India’s largest engineering presence.

We asked him the same question. He has a well rehearsed answer. Working in Google, Bangalore, is not representative of working in either Bangalore or India, he says. “Once inside Google, it is tremendously similar. In both the places, we hire extremely motivated people, those who have high cognitive ability. The temperature in the workplace is the same; the meeting rooms have the same decor; we have the same professionalism. In both the places, people use data for making choices, use logic. The two places are similar in culture, in the way we build products, argue about things, get launch approvals, launch products. It is true that I get way more delicious Indian food here than in the US. It is also true that there are many more Indians working here than in the US,” he quips.

Google’s culture, Rangarajan argues, makes it a different company to work for. Prior to 2008, he had worked for companies of different sizes, including a company that employed 10 people. “Google is a very large company. But it still remains a conglomeration of several groups which are start-up-ish, which have big goals to achieve,” he says.