What Does It Feels Like Working at a Google Partner Company

Albizia Akbar
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

Who doesn’t know Google, right? You have something in mind, you just type it out and Google let you know the answer. Not only that Google is the best search engine website out there, it is also one huge — if not the biggest — technology company that exist today.

So, how does it feels like working at Google? It must be special, right?

Well, I don’t know the real answer, yet, but at least by six months working at Kok Bisa of Kibar, which is one of Google’s partner in Indonesia, I kinda know how does it feels like to be a Googler — people who work at Google. That’s because our CEO really implemented the Google culture in every aspect of our work.

First, being a Googler means that you need to run fast and efficient. Yep, here we are forced to finish our job fast and complete. Means that we have to have a good time management skills. It is kinda tricky because instead of rule our work hours, Kibar give flexibility for us to choose when is the most productive hours of our day. So, if I don’t make a plan, then I am planning to fail.

They are doing this simply because they thought that everyone knows what time is the best for them to work. By doing that, the company let the staff to be independent but in the same time be more productive. That is because, at the end, the output of our work is more important than the process itself. It’s a matter of how to produce that output.

Second, we are taught to always asking why. Why is that? Simply because we need to understand the root of the problems that we are facing everyday. By being that way, the company teach us to not only doing our work, but encourage us to find the best way to solve the problems.

Like Elon Musk ever said — we need to find the foundational, self-evident proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption. That being said, working at Kibar made us learn everything new everyday by simply asking that one question. ‘Why?’ It can avoid us to just became a robot that doing any mechanical and repetitive works every single day. Anyone need to be improved everyday here at Kibar.

Third, in Kibar, there are no silos. You know silos, right? So, it is one word to describe the divisions of the company. For example, the creative designers staff will not be involved in any of content writers project. That’s the silos, everyone just working at what they are entitled to.

Well, that’s not the case in Kibar. Our CEO always say that everyone need to know everyone else’s works. Simply because he believed that collaboration could only be happened if we are talking to each other, discussing about things that we are not familiar with, and then trying to seek the problems together. That means there’s no division in our company at all. As a content writer, I can learn about graphic design, animation, or even project management too.

Last but not least, Kibarians — that’s how we used to call people who work here — need to think how to automate their work. By automate, it means that in the future, we don’t need to be the one who creating products. It will soon be replaced by robot. So, as the intelligent creature, we need to think how we give our work so that it could be finished automatically.

Let’s give an example here. Let say that as a writer, I need to write two script a week. So, instead of doing all the research, outline, or even the writing, I am building a machine who could learn to do that for me. In the result, I can produce more and more contents and my duty will only be proofreading those articles.

In conclusion, I can say for the last six months, I already gained a lot of new skills. I learned about time management, project management, automation skills, and any other useful skills too. Well, I didn’t mention about cool workspace, the playstation corner, and free lunch+dinner here, because that’s only one little aspect that this company offers. Well, I can really say, working at this new environment is really challenging, but it kinda fun and it doesn’t feel boring at all!

Albizia Akbar

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West Java delegate for Australia-Indonesia Youth Exchange Program 2018. Follow my AIYEP related story here