ShareThisSAN BRUNO, Calif. - Clearly, this isn't the typical American workplace.
Just inside the sleek glass doors of YouTube's corporate headquarters is a rock climbing wall. Straight ahead, five guys in T-shirts and jeans cluster around a foosball table, engrossed in a lunch-hour game. At the front desk, the receptionist's tiny, quivering Chihuahua watches over a candy jar.
And that's just the lobby.
From the standard company attire -- jeans and T-shirts, mostly -- to the indoor putting green, the outdoor Frisbee golf course and the gourmet cafe dishing up free fare, YouTube is a work environment that's more akin to summer camp for adults.
YouTube and Google, its parent company in nearby Mountain View, Calif., are two of Silicon Valley's hotbeds of hiring. Jobs here are some of the most coveted around.
Behind the perks and quirks, there's a serious business. Google is a $170 billion global empire spanning more than 40 countries. Having morphed far beyond its Internet search engine roots, Google's business brawn has attracted antitrust scrutiny here and abroad.
But the atmosphere inside its smaller YouTube subsidiary more closely resembles that of a young startup.
While job growth in most of California remains anemic, here in the tech-dotted valley Google, YouTube and others like LinkedIn, Facebook, Salesforce and Zynga are "hiring furiously," recruiters say.
"They may only be hiring five, 10 or 15 people," said Dawn Block, a veteran Silicon Valley technology jobs headhunter, "but in the aggregate it adds up."
Block said clients pass up Google offers to work instead for smaller startups partly because Google's global size has erased some of the startup fervor that characterized its early years. Plus, with fewer stock options and more contract hiring, there's less assurance of job stability or the potential to become an "instant millionaire."
Google's work environment is not for wimps, either, said Patti Wilson, a longtime Silicon Valley executive coach. For instance, she said, employee performance reviews are quarterly and available for your peers to review.
"It's not for the faint of heart who don't want to work hard," she said.
Some 3,000 applications a day come into Google. Job candidates typically go through four interviews, with both managers and their would-be peers. The company prides itself on asking tough questions "that test your ability to think on your feet and ... (react) to stuff on the fly," said Christopher Dale, 36, a corporate communications manager who toggles between the Google and YouTube campuses.
Google does not disclose employee salaries or stock options. It has traditional company benefits: an employer-matching 401(k) plan, health care, child care -- and offbeat perks such as free bicycles or Razr scooters to glide down corridors.
With the company's gourmet cafes, most employees rarely drift off campus for lunch.
"By keeping employees here and talking about ideas ... a lunch conversation could lead to Gmail or some other Google innovation," Dale said.
Despite the seemingly hard-to-leave workplace, Dale says there's a big emphasis on "work/life balance." On weekends, his boss believes in turning off the cellphone and emails, except for an emergency. "Weekends are for spending with your family," said Dale, a married father of two kids. "... There's a real sense of connecting with people's lives and changing the world."
Compared to the more straight-laced corporate culture of Apple, Google's YouTube feels "like a startup but with the resources of a far bigger company," says Josh Sassoon, 30. The "user-experience designer" works with YouTube's engineering team, helping design features like Cosmic Panda, where users gather and "curate" favorite videos, channels and playlists.
Sitting in a conference room where conceptual ideas are scribbled all over the whiteboards, Sassoon said, "Here, every week, every single person at every level can contribute something. That's a very exciting environment."
Sassoon says he and his colleagues don't want to miss a day at the office. The feeling is so pervasive there's a Google term for it: "FOMO" or Fear of Missing Out.
Asked whether that sounded a bit like a cult, Dale laughed: "It would be if we all weren't so disheveled, nerdy and ... Googley."
Said Block: "The companies with the strongest culture -- Google, YouTube -- it's like gravity. It holds you in place and makes you feel all-powerful."
(Contact Claudia Buck of The Sacramento Bee at cbuck(at)sacbee.com.)
