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Google Hires 200 Goats Every Year for Fieldwork
Google’s sustainable approach will blow your mind
Google, we have all heard of it. The search engine giant that has become a verb in our everyday lives. But, what you may not know is that Google is constantly looking for new and innovative ways to do things… even if that means thinking outside the box.
Google was established on September 4th, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in Menlo Park, California after Sun co-founder, Andy Bechtolsheim, wrote them a cheque for $100,000.
Larry and Sergey, like clever geniuses, put this money to good use by resorting to minimalism. During the early days, the duo crafted indoor desks out of sawhorses to save the cost of buying new furniture and make the most of the existing resources.
Similarly, they built their first CPU enclosure using lego bricks.
The company did everything it could to sustain itself in the long run and become the first tech startup to achieve a trillion-dollar mark.
Now, Google has become the dream company of every engineering graduate but only a few can make it to their desk. The company receives around three million applications each year and its acceptance rate is just 0.2%.
To increase the chances of being hired by Google, one either needs to be a graduate of Harvard or a goat. Nope, here goat doesn’t stand for ‘greatest of all time’ but the actual breathing four-legged creature.
Unlike Apple’s way of removing charging adapters from the iPhone boxes to save the environment, Google’s low-carbon approach is different.
In the spring of 2009, Google hired 200 goats to clear the vacant fields on their mount-view headquarters instead of using lawn mowers. The company rented these animals from a goat-herding company called California Grazing.
“When someone said goods, Google herd goats.” — the shepherd with a hat.
According to Google, the cost it took to contract the goats was equivalent to lawn mowing services offered by other companies. Yet, Google being Google, decided to break the norm and hired 200 goats and several herders to manage these animals.
