The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - I'm Feeling Lucky

Douglas edwards is one lucky guy! Hence the name of the book. While reading this book I kept on asking....why are you at this company? After reading the book I kept asking...why was he at the company? The last chapter solidifies my opinion. Listen the book is a good read, albeit a tad droll after awhile of the growth of one of the greatest company acendecies of all time.

They must of really liked Doug because he really did not do much for the company. What he did do was take risk....he risked his families money, his future, and without really knowing if google would survive. This to me is the greatest part of the book.

And for that I really enjoyed the book. Plus Mr Edwards style of writting is somewhat entertaining.

I wasn't expecting a technically-led book, and sure enough this book provides mostly anecdotes and a fairly top-level overview of the early business with very little technical insight. But Edwards's trysts with other Googlers are so over-written, whiny, and laden with such hypocrisy that the book feels insidiously self-righteous and untrustworthy.

Worst yet is that while it clearly does not give an accurate account there is absolutely nothing juicy, insightful or new than simply one man's journey to desire something new, not like what he finds, and whine continually. For example, he continually derides the 'Engineering Perspective' for its focus on productivity and inability to accept conclusion without evidence, yet he himself recounts that he practically delivered nothing of value for at least the first year of his employment. The only proud announcement he makes is the writing and finishing of a marketing plan, which in itself does not drive any revenue.

Initially interesting, the book eventually got to the point where I paged through it quickly, for several reasons.

1. Too many words. There's WAY too much detail here. Only an insider would really care.

2. Douglas Edwards' viewpoint mirrors Google's arrogance and self-centeredness. That gets old fast.

3. It's hard to maintain respect for someone who virtually abandoned his family for years as he pursued this all-consuming job. He had three young children and hardly spent any time with them, leaving his wife a virtual single mother during that period.

4. He and many others at Google were in awe that Al Gore and Jimmy Carter kept dropping by Google's headquarters. In fact, Gore is lauded several times throughout the book, as if he's some kind of national icon. Give me a break.

5. Some of the turf wars Edwards had with colleagues involved incredibly trivial things, like the wording of Google's fifth birthday message. Is this what he means when he congratulates himself and his colleagues for making the world a better place? These details show how little he really contributed to Google's success. Frankly, it seems he just turned up in the right place at the right time to get hired as number 59 and hang on until the company went public.

6. For a book by a former journalist, this has lots of typos: lowercase letters at the start of sentences, for example, and misplaced commas. Since Edwards often recounts his arguments with Google colleagues over such matters, you've got to wonder whether he even proofed his own book before it was published.

7. Edwards turns himself inside out trying to explain why Google wouldn't simply display a U.S. flag on its site immediately after 9/11 as a show of solidarity. Instead, the staff went round and round in discussing all other possibilities and finally ended up displaying a red white & blue ribbon. Yeah, whatever. God forbid you should sully your pristine site with our national flag.

I think that 9/11 episode epitomizes all the attitude problems behind this book: the author overthinks, spends too much time on details, and believes the universe centers around Google. Ultimately, these are the factors that drag it down into unreadability.

I wish to second other reviewers here, who point out that the writer's background in English and astute observations about his fellow man, make for a great book. If you want more emphasis on the tech (though there's plenty here) go read Wired, and if you want more deal-making insight, read Barrons. But, if you want to feel like you're there, read this book.

A very eloquent tale of an English major writer at an engineer-focused technology company. I find it very well-written and a fascinating journey. It is obvious that Edwards felt under-appreciated and his constant tussle with Marissa Mayer probably rang his death knell at Google.

Edwards was ever trying to carry the flag of brand management right until his last days at Google. Apparently, that strategy was not the Googley thing to do.

Edwards narrative is introspective and humorous. While his end at Google was done quite quickly, he is quite graceful about it. After all, Google made him a rich man.

Written by the 59th employee hired by Google, this memoir of a non-engineer working at Google in its early years was quite interesting! Turns out that he found his niche being the "voice" of Google. You'll have to read the book to find out what that means. If you're a Google fan, you will enjoy the book. I especially love how Edwards ended it, so if you don't make it all the way through, at least read the last two paragraphs.

I really enjoyed this memoir of an early-days Google employee. One of my interests is business history, and I love the first-person accounts of individuals who have insider knowledge of a company or industry. This memoir is written in an entertaining yet informative style, and the author displays a sense of humor which adds to the appeal of the book.

Entertaining read of the early years of Google, the relationships between top executives and an overview of the internal culture led by Larry and Sergey, which is far from traditional. The author was not only writing to tell his story, but also to justify his contribution in the early years of the company.

Douglas Edwards knows how to write, but this book was a little bit of a disappointment to me. I can't really quantify what I was expecting...something "grand", I guess, that would shine a bright light on the secret history of Google. Instead I found this book mostly a run-of-the-mill account of Mr. Edwards' five years with the company.

The highlights are enjoyable: the author being interviewed by eccentric co-founder Sergey Brin; Google's reaction to the 9/11 attacks; the origins of Gmail.

Unfortunately, the highlights are few and far between. The book runs close to 400 pages and I can honestly say I only really enjoyed a few pages here and there. The rest of the book is really just high-tech filler. Part of the problem may be that Mr. Edwards seems to have approached the book as if it were a thesis paper: identify a theme and then defend the theme using as many examples as possible. In this case, the theme is "Google is different and awesome, and Larry and Sergey are different and awesome."

If you are a techie, you may enjoy this book, but I'm not sure the casual reader will get much from this book.

I enjoyed this book very much. As an English major who isn't very tech savy I appreciated the humor the author found in his situation in the Googleplex. Taking the risk of leaving his newspaper gig to take a chance on a start-up worked well for him. He made his fortune, and his marriage survived the strain for a positive outcome.
Then came the President's townhall at Linkedin, and our author's plea to have his taxes raised. He's entitled to his opinions, but I have to say that I wish I weren't aware of them. Nevertheless, his account of his career from Noogler to Xoogler was very entertaining and informative. Perhaps he'll donate some of the proceeds to a charity other than the federal government.

Written with candor and wit, I'm Feeling Lucky chronicles the sure-footed missteps and unwise rightness that marked the early days of Google, a contrarian upstart whose wild success seems inevitable only in restrospect. Highly recommended.

This is a funny story about Jewgle, the search engine company where all the power jobs are held by Jews. It describes the adventures of the author, who, it becomes clear, should never have been hired. His professional specialty is 'branding' a skill for which the founders decided there was no need. He apparently was hired by mistake.

The book is well written and describes how the author spends his career fighting with Marissa, a beautiful blondie, who threatens to sit on his face if he does not obey her professional directives. The author runs in panic to hide behind the skirts of Cindy, his equally beautiful dark-haired supervisor. She tries hard to protect him from the political turmoil that fills every business day.

He describes well how the company was started by two dropouts, who received funding from over-trusting investors, without having any idea how to monetize their search engine device to produce profits.

The company is very proud of its Page Rank system of prioritizing responses to a search request. This ranking method may be good for increasing profits but is a real deterrent to a serious researcher and drives him to use other search engines. For example, if a researcher is looking into ways to recover material from sunken vessels he may search on 'tackle' to see what is available for securing the undersea materiel to a hoist. His responses, however, will be heavily weighted towards football teams and other sports since 'tackle' will get the most Page referrals from the inquiries of sports fans and will thus have a higher ranking.

The author goes on to describe the naissance of Gmail with important decisions being fought over and not being made until finally the question is referred to the 'founders', Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. They issue a decision which finally puts the turmoil to rest.

It seems apparent that most of the policy disagreements that the author was involved in during his career at the company resulted in his point of view being crushed. His frustration and belittlement shines through in the text and one feels sorry for him. But when his stock options finally vest his multi-million dollar bonanza cheers him up and with a smile on his face, he follows the path of his supervisor Cindy and quits the firm.

This book didn't move me, though there were moments of tantalizing trash talking. The author of this text begins his Google story by clearly and boldly telling us the he hadn't a clue to Google's business nor marketing strategy for success and that he pretty much winged his sojourn at Google by vaguely finding problems in the marketing dept. and inventing new ways of reinventing the marketing wheel. All of Google's success is secret and locked away in computer code. Any hope of discovering the growth of Google's billion dollar strategy for marketing success goes down the drain fast. In fact, one is lead to believe, and I do believe, that Google had no real strategy and that apart from cost cutting cheapness that would embarrass a poor retired social security recipient and the ego deflation antics to suck the life blood from the Googler engineers, the now billionare owners simply pretended to know what they were doing business wise. Who knows?

The vast majority of this book is just a hodge podge of "confessions," which amount to snarky or sentamental little time capsules and anecdotes about the "overachieving" engineers working endlessly towards who knows what goal, the chaos of a company pretending to be non hierarchal, and the random new gimmicks that Google has and still floats hoping any one (or all) will go viral and add to the billions of dollars marketing ransom.

Mistakes were made. One gets the impression that this author has a family, but that was a huge wasted literary mistep. This English majoring author should have remembered that audiences love conflict and tension weaved into the overall storyline. Instead of daily office power wars, a running battle between the fake fun of Google and the real life joy of family, children, and loyal wife would have added a larger meaningful backdrop. Instead we get repeated glimpses of office politics, vague management techniques, rah-rah cheerleading tales about embarrassingly cheap expense cutting habits and the brilliant over-achieving engineers who over saw them, all interspersed randomly with rare glimpses of the gurus of Google, the founders, who do nothing but are responsible for everything.

The author does do gossip good, and there are a few tantalizing bits thrown in, but there's no depth or discovery here. Google is well protected, and the author gets a chance to pad his dot.com stock option retirement he and countless others got by Lady Luck. Seeing how life is lived in the Googleplex, I would never want any part of it no matter how intellectually talented. No wonder the best and brightest seem only to want to rush headlong into that chaotic environment, pocket loads of cash, and run like hell for the exits while one is still sane. It's not a career goal but a strategic get rich quick scheme that requires a degree in Computer Science.

Ultimatly the book is a bore because one clearly feels that the author is holding back and that buried underneath this book's fluff, Google really IS evil.

How do you make a contribution to reduce the debt?

There are two ways for you to make a contribution to reduce the debt:
*You can make a contribution online either by credit card, checking or savings account at Pay.gov
*You can write a check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt, and in the memo section, notate that it's a Gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public. Mail your check to:

Attn Dept G
Bureau of the Public Debt
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188

Please, why waste your time listening to a guy that would call for increasing taxes in this horrible economy. He appears to be a shill for our President at one of his latest campaign stops. By the way, I would ask whether this guy hires a tax advisor to find every loophole in the tax code while asking for higher taxes. Very disingenuous argument by a very disingenuous person. Stay away.

UPDATE: After giving this book another chance by suffering through the first few chapters of "Oh golly gosh" sentiment, I'm glad I did. The writing style of the initial chapters really irritated me to the point of abandoning this book with a two-star rating. But after sticking with it a little longer, I'm glad I did - this book is an incredibly fascinating and well-written look at how Google evolved through various phases of maturity, even while being haltered to the idefatigable egos of Larry and Sergey.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: If I have to read, one more time, about how this old guy thought Sergey Brin and Larry Page would look up to his erudite wisdom, I'm gonna lose my spit. I get it, the author was extremely proud about how valuable he thought his wisdom would be, and he was wrong. That said, I stopped reading the book fairly early because the writing style just really irritated me. I'm going to try to return to this book again later, and will update this review if I find anything of value. But until then, maybe you can Google for stories instead.