IT Milk: entry

Today’s visit to the Googleplex was unreal. The main campus was above and beyond my expectations, while the culture and environment at Google was just as I had read about on blogs all these years. Google has truly built an incredible company that cannot be replicated at its current scale. So would I want to work there if I had the opportunity? That’s a different story that I’ll discuss further below.

So for a chronology of our day, a van picked us up at 7:50am to leave for the Googleplex which was only about a 15 minutes’ drive away from our hotel in Sunnyvale. Our Penn State University team arrived in conjunction with the University of Western Australia, James Madison University and Boise State University. Inside the Visitor’s Lobby, on display was one of the original server racks and a projection screen constantly scrolling with real-time search queries.

The night before at our hotel lounge, we had already met Jamie Murphy and Larry Neale from the Global Academic Panel as well as Lee Hunter and Karen Hudson from Google UK. So it was cool knowing their faces as well as the UWA team before arriving at the Googleplex.

We then proceeded into the No Name Cafe for breakfast. The variety and abundance of food was a mouthwatering sight. At this point Simon Corby, our Director of Business Development from the College of IST, joined us for the meal after flying into San Francisco the previous night.

Next, the series of presentations proceeded. Some people who came to speak to us were representatives from Sales, Marketing, PR, University Relations; the team that developed the Google Online Marketing Challenge grading algorithm. From one of the presentations, here are the 7 Principles of Marketing used at Google:

1. Let others speak for you
2. Data. Not hype
3. Results must be trackable
4. Promote trial
5. You’re smart. And your time matters
6. We’re serious. Except when we’re not
7. Big ideas move us

You may also be familiar with Google’s 70-20-10 rule where employees can use 20% of their time working on their own projects. We learned that the Google Online Marketing Challenge was a 20% project of Lee Hunter and Karen Hudson from Google UK which is a cool fact. Lee was apparently only two-months into his employment at Google and came up with the idea for the Challenge, and the management enthusiastically urged him forward to make his idea flourish into the international competition that we all competed in.

During lunch at the No Name Cafe again, I happened to sit by Trevor Claiborne (Product Marketing Manager, Google) who writes many of the posts for the Inside Adwords blog. That was a priceless experience being able to speak face-to-face with an internal employee who works on many of the Google products that we use everyday. Trevor currently works on the Website Optimizer, wrote the textbook for the Google Online Marketing Challenge, beta tested Google Chrome, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

Following lunch was the awards ceremony. The UWA Global Winners team received their Macbook Pros and our team received our Macbooks. Turns out our Macbooks are fully-loaded with maxed out specifications. Right now as I write this in the hotel room at 1am Matt Maisel is thoroughly enjoying his first enlightening Mac experience.

Overall, the day at the Googleplex was a success. We walked out of Mountain View at the end of the day with our new Macbooks, learned more about Google than we ever could without directly visiting, and had an invaluable networking opportunity with Googlers and other students.

Back to my original question about whether I would work at Google given the opportunity, my answer is not clear. I do love the culture and all the benefits and freedoms that the employees seem to enjoy. However, after visiting Twitter and Weebly in particular the day before, there is a strong contrast. David Rusenko mentioned to me that the reason he loves startups so much is that your contributions to the company make a difference; everything you accomplish when you show up for work each day can make or break the company. Google’s 70-20-10 rule is cool too, but doing that 20% as your full-time job would be even better.