No offices -- just open spaces. not true; plenty of offices around perimeters.
Too academic (from Stanford days?) for my tastes. also untrue; googlers are mostly evaluated on quantifiable impact on products, not by their academic research publications. they are explicitly not an academic lab. for details, see:
This isn't completely correct, although you used enough qualifiers that I'm ok with it.
I work at Google as an engineer, do blue-sky scientific research in biophysics, and publish it; those publications (which are unrelated to Google's core mission) are part of my performance evaluation:
for a couple recent papers I published with academic scientists based on blue-sky academic research carried out at Google by Visiting Faculty (see this page for a list of the Visiting Faculty and their projects: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/12/millions-of-core-...)
That said, I really am a unicorn by the definition of your recent post, and there aren't very many of me at Google. After completing work on Exacycle (and handing it off to a team of scientists to play with), I've moved to a new project to apply my skills to something that is completely consistent with the hybrid approach. But our hybrid approach is not limited to computer science.
Many of us who do some kind of research at Google worked in academia, and many also worked in the fabled research labs of the 60s like PARC or Bell Labs; we learned the lessons those labs taught us, and are now applying at high speed and skill to challenging new problems.
As for the term "infantilizing" that's just absurd linkbait.
Too academic (from Stanford days?) for my tastes. also untrue; googlers are mostly evaluated on quantifiable impact on products, not by their academic research publications. they are explicitly not an academic lab. for details, see:
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...