Pleasing Google's Tech-Savvy Staff 142
An anonymous reader writes "Douglas Merrill, Google Inc.'s chief information officer, is charged with answering that question. His job is to give Google workers the technology they need, and to keep them safe — without imposing too many restrictions on how they do their job. So the 37-year-old has taken an unorthodox approach. Unlike many IT departments that try to control the technology their workers use, Mr. Merrill's group lets Google employees download software on their own, choose between several types of computers and operating systems, and use internal software built by the company's engineers. Lately, he has also spent time evangelizing to outside clients about Google's own enterprise-software products — such as Google Apps, an enterprise version of Google's Web-based services including e-mail, word processing and a calendar."
Nice approach (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish our IT was like this. (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently built an application for my group that started off in PHP/MySQL. The customers were using it and loving it, but IT said they're not interested in supporting PHP and we weren't allowed to stand up a server. After months of talk with them and compromising, it was rewritten into JSP/Oracle. Then they said we're not allowed to do that either, so we agreed on C#.net/MS SQL. I rewrote it to that and after a month, they again came back and said no way. Getting ever more frustrated (I now had the same program in several languages), I ended up in C# Desktop Application instead of web/MySQL. They've been complaining again, but we have more leverage there in that my entire group was stood up to build desktop apps. I'll probably have to switch it to Oracle, but that shouldn't be a big hit.
We wasted lots of time and money rewriting what was already done all because of politics. I always thought IT was meant to *support* rather than hinder.
Re:All Credit to Him (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea is not to restrict people, but restrict damaging elements from hopping around your network.
How? (Score:1, Insightful)
Mostly fluff (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wish our IT was like this. (Score:1, Insightful)
My view is that situations like this are what managers are for. They are there to traverse the politics for you to get your php application up because that's what needs to be done. They also have more leverage when talking to the IT department's manager, or when talking to the Department Manager that the IT manager probably reports to, which is good.
Re:Nice approach (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not really sure how that works.
Other than leaking source code onto the Internet, I don't really see what problems this could cause. I work at a small company with a similar philosophy -- the company buys your hardware, and certain software if you need it, but you can use whatever you want so long as you're not fighting with it on the clock.
But think about it: Spam botnets can be blocked by killing port 25 outbound. Data loss can be managed by the fact that everything's on version control, which is backed up. Traditional spyware and viruses will at worst take a machine down, at which point, it's the responsibility of whoever owns that machine to fix it -- or maybe they try to spread over the local network, at which point, staying patched and/or running a personal firewall will pretty much stop it.
The only real danger would be if we got big enough to be a target for deliberate attacks, and someone stole our source code. Google is arguably this big, but I've never heard of a leak from them. TFA does mention a possible strategy:
So what mistake could one employee make to ruin it for everyone?
Re:How? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nice approach (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All Credit to Him (Score:3, Insightful)
If you allow some employees access through those walls to other networks, and a hacker manages to get their credentials it can start to get quite nasty.
Even if the isolation between networks is good there's also the possibility of _work_ being secretly tampered with. I'm sure there are hacker who would want to tamper with GMail or Google Desktop.
Or confidential information leaking out.
Re:I wish our IT was like this. (Score:3, Insightful)
If they're only willing to support a specific language, then you need to work in their requirement (generally speaking).
Not uncommon in tech-savvy organisations (Score:4, Insightful)
More than once I got hold of an oldish spare computer and installed Gentoo Linux on it, and the only justification I had for doing so was that Windows got on my nerves. Not much of a business case, but as far as they were concerned I was a big boy and could look after myself, and it was no skin off their nose as long as it didn't take up tech support's time.
The only thing that made us different from the tied-down masses elsewhere in the company was our level of knowledge about what we were working with. I maintain that the best security system is user education. Obviously that's not to suggest that you should throw caution to the wind, but clued-up people generally won't get you in trouble. So clue them up.
Right now I'm in a much more locked-down environment and it's incredibly frustrating. Something as simple as connecting to a printer is a nightmare because I have to go through some tech support clown who invariably knows a lot less than I do and bumbles around randomly prodding things till it works. I don't have admin rights to my own machine, and useful things like the command line are blocked. It drives me mad, and it holds me back in my work, but hey, some IT goon has an easier life because of it, so it's all fair enough, right?
Google is full of smart people, and the people in charge are clearly smart enough to treat them as such. I wish more companies would follow this example.
Re:Nice approach (Score:3, Insightful)
Get pwn3d and:
a) Commit GMail/etc code secretly backdoored by a hacker.
b) Leak out the search ranking and antisearch spam methods/algorithm google uses. Google's search results are already not as good as they were years ago.
standards-compliance (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice approach (Score:3, Insightful)
b) I got nothin', though I'm willing to bet the search algorithm is one of those things that not many people get to see/tinker with.
Re:How? (Score:5, Insightful)
Last Adopter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wish our IT was like this. (Score:1, Insightful)
Not if it's Microsoft. Then the 'IT' department is working against you. Sure you pay them, but their goal is to further the agenda of their political party. It's got stock and it files with the SEC but sure enough some kind a political party.
If they can't force you to toe Bill's line, they do their most to throw sand in your gears to see if you'll give up.
Re:Not uncommon in tech-savvy organisations (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because you have some brilliant techies doesn't mean they are all security conscious as well.
Re:I wish our IT was like this. (Score:2, Insightful)
IT is a cost, but if they are doing their jobs correctly they can also work to save the company money. Most software engineers have no clue about what technology would be best to implement their products on, they only know what got touted as the best/fastest/newest thing on
Generally, there's just too much ego involved from both sides. Everybody thinks their right and are more willing to play office politics to try to "prove" it than to just get the fucking job done.