Inside Google

A View Into Google's Inner Workings by Dan Farber:

Merrill listed the following attributes of Google’s development culture:

Hire smart people who are nice to work with
Flat management structure
No silos, open communications
Ideas mailing list
20 percent (time spent on personal projects)
Small projects
Iterative design, constant improvement
Server-based deployment (AJAX)
Test, don’t guess

“Innovation doesn’t happen ‘on the way by,’ it must be design into everything we do,”