An unexpected invitation to a manager's meeting can usually make employees feel anxious. However, for the employees of Google Labs, such an invitation might indicate that senior management wants to let you know just how outstanding you are.
Google Labs, Gemini and AI Studio, the Vice President, stated in the latest issue of "Lenny's Podcast" that such surprise recognition meetings are a kind of "secret club" ceremony by the team for the most valuable employees.
“Basically, we put the invitation in someone’s calendar, and it might seem a bit intimidating because there will be four or five team leaders present,” Woodward said to podcast host Lenny Rachitsky, adding that the agenda would not be specified in the invitation.
“Then they arrived, and we took turns speaking. We sat in a circle and told them why we were so grateful for them joining our team,” said Woodward.
Woodward described these stages as "quite interesting" and mentioned that employees often discover the real purpose of the meetings with surprise.
“I always start the meeting by saying, ‘This is not a bad meeting; this is a good meeting,’” he said. “Your mind might naturally assume the worst at first, but in fact, we’re doing the opposite. These people are among the most valuable employees.”
Woodward indicates that such surprise recognition meetings are one of the ways in which Google Labs celebrates the often unnoticed work behind its AI products.
He said that the team also has a tradition of awarding some quirky prizes to their employees.
This includes prizes such as “TPU harvester”, with the prize being a “mini rake” from Etsy as well as cash rewards, given to those employees who optimized Google’s AI chips, namely the Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) (Tensor Processing Units, TPU), said Woodward.
“Some of us wanted to find a way to reward those who do the tedious and dirty work of optimizing efficiency and recycling TPU, to ‘harvest’ TPU, so that we can build the next batch of features and drive growth,” he said, adding, “So we turned it into a big celebration.”
Employees who fix minor product defects or what can be described as "paper-cut wounds" ( paper cuts ) will receive a golden band-aid, Woodward says. Those who find unexpected ways to enable the AI model to gain new capabilities may become " LLM whisperer ", and in return, they get a pair of huge ears and a "very nice" mechanical keyboard.
“We tried to find ways to encode value using these somewhat silly symbols, but they actually make sense,” he said, explaining, “We’re always coming up with such strange ideas.”
