Google’s Secret Weapon: Toilet Admonishment
Despite recent miscues like allowing Chinese censorship and paying motion picture studios hush money Google remains an Internet darling. What is the source of this goodwill? From what fount doth Google’s mead flow? Ironically enough, Google may just continue its rocket-ride to unrealistically high expectations because of what it does in the bathroom.
On the Google Code blog the latest entry touts Google’s program for motivating employees. The crux? Google reminds employees how to be #1 while they’re taking a #2. From the post:
Today we’re unveiling the public release of “Testing on the Toilet”: one of Google’s little secrets that has helped us inspire our developers to write well-tested code. We regularly write flyers about everything from dependency injection to code coverage, and then plaster the bathrooms all over Google with each episode, almost 500 stalls worldwide.
We’ve decided to share this secret weapon with the rest of the world to spread our passion to other developers, and to provide a fun and easy way to educate yourself (and the rest of your company) about these important tricks and techniques.
In other words, Google has taken one of the last bastions of personal solitude inside increasingly overbearing corporate structures and turned it into work time. What’s next? Harnessing developer’s body heat while they sleep to power the Googleplex?
