FITZ: I'm Fitz.

BEN: And I'm Ben.

FITZ: And we're here to answer your questions.

BEN: What's the next question, Mr. Fitz?

FITZ: Let me check on my gPad right here.

You know I've got some new apps for this, actually?

One's called a pencil, and the new one's called--

BEN: Paper app?

FITZ: --Paper App.

Yeah, the paper app is fabulous.

It really feels like real paper.

BEN: Calendar's a little rough, though.

FITZ: Yeah, the calandar's a little rough.

Especially when you make a lot of changes.

But anyway, on to the question.

The first question we have here is from Mayank.

I hope I pronounced that right.

And it is "how much time do you give to your family and

friends?"

BEN: "How much do you give to your family?" Well--

FITZ: That's a personal question.

BEN: I think maybe what he's really asking is do people who

work at Google have time for family and friends?

I think that's the implicit question.

I've seen other questions like that.

FITZ: You have a family and I have friends.

So together, I think we're-- no, I'm just kidding.

Absolutely is the answer.

I mean, Work-life balance is something we talk about a lot,

and it's really important, I think.

We talk about long term and hiring people for the long

term who are a good match.

BEN: Ah, the Blade Analogy.

FITZ: The only way you're going to keep people for the

long term, I think, is that if you have a

good work-life balance.

BEN: Keep them happy.

FITZ: Right.

Well, the Blade Analogy actually has to do more with

ongoing learning, I would say.

BEN: OK.

But also just burning out your engineers is another way to

think about it, right?

FITZ: Yes, so we'll talk about that.

Most companies are out there looking for the sharpest blade

in the drawer.

That's the recruiting program.

We're looking for a very sharp knife, so that we can use it

to cut things, right, to cut through hard engineering

problems. And a lot of companies will take that sharp

knife, and they will grind it against the sidewalk.

BEN: 80 hours a week.

FITZ: Right.

When you do that, and then a couple years you're like, hey,

I have a dull knife.

I want to get rid of this knife, and get a new knife.

And then you go and they spend a lot of time to find a new

sharp knife, so to speak.

BEN: Not a sustainable strategy.

FITZ: Right.

So having a good work-life balance is part of a way of

sharpening that knife, and I think the big part of it, is

ongoing education, right?

We have a lot of tech talks here.

We have a lot of interesting people come in and talk about

what they're doing in computer science.

A lot of, I think, just interesting talks about what

we're doing project-wise.

BEN: We share.

It's very academic internally, very academic community.

But beyond that, as managers we are encouraged to be very

aware of work-life balance, and to see what

our reports are doing.

Do they have a life?

Are they spending too much time at work?

I know there's a lot of rumors.

I've heard rumors, oh, if you work at Google, you're going

to work 80 hours a week.

You're going to be burned out, blah blah blah.

They expect you to live there.

And I have not seen that ever in the five

years I've been here.

It's really just--

FITZ: There are times, I think, when there's a little

bit of a crunch, right?

Where you're--

BEN: That's true of any company.

FITZ: You're going towards a goal, and so it's like we have

a deadline--

not necessarily a deadline, but we're trying

to launch on Friday.

BEN: As long as it's an occasional thing.

If it's an occasional crisis, an occasional deadline, then

sure, everybody works a little harder.

But it's not the norm, say, like in the gaming industry,

where you really are expected to work 80 hours a week all

the time, and If you don't like it, there's 20 people

lined up to take your job.

At Google, the theory is if you are working more than 40

hours a week all the time, then something is very wrong

with that team, and it will get attention,

and it will get corrected.

And we even have a case sometimes of engineers getting

so enthusiastic that they'll work too hard without

realizing it.

FITZ: I think that's the biggest challenge, because

you're working with a lot of exciting technology, with

really big, scalable systems. And it's tempting, I think, to

continue working on stuff, just because it's so

fascinating and so much fun.

BEN: Right.

We've seen examples of folks maybe who are just out of

college, they have no spouse or kids or anything, and they

just get so excited, they just stay at work late, right?

And no one's stopping them, because they're so

excited about it.

But the truth is, certainly as a manager, if that person

keeps doing that over and over, they will burn out, and

you have to stop them and say wait, relax, take a vacation.

FITZ: We've seen this happen before.

BEN: Yeah, we've stopped it.

FITZ: Ourselves included, right, burning ourselves out.

I think it's important to maintain the balance, to keep

a focus on the long term.

BEN: The message I've heard from upper management is if

people work too long and too hard and burn themselves out,

it's not worth it.

Maybe you get more hours out of the person, but you get

very bad code.

The quality of the work goes down.

It's just not worth it.

FITZ: I think you can do that sort of grind if you're not

doing anything necessarily creative.

If you're just cranking out just really simple, boring

assembly line type code--

BEN: That's not Google.

FITZ: --You can do that.

That's definitely not Google.

I think writing really good scalable code is a very

creative endeavor, and it takes a

lot of creative thinking.

And if you're not rested, and you haven't had a minute to

step out and look at different things, I think then it's hard

for you to really get into that creative mode.

BEN: Yup.

So the answer is Google is actually quite aware of the

tension between work and life.

We focus on it, and we try to find that balance very well

FITZ: And Googlers do have family and friends.

BEN: Yes.

FITZ: All right.

BEN: All right, we're done.

FITZ: That's good for today.

Thanks a lot.

BEN: Bye-bye.