Talking with "Google"

Yesterday the Open source program manager at Google, Chris DiBona, came to speak at the University and I had an opportunity to talk with him afterwards at the school’s pre-arranged social hour. It was the most insightful conversation I’ve had with an industry expert since coming to Irvine. Chris possessed an acute awareness of the open source community and the persona of a very self aware and good natured sarcastic asshole, which made him pretty engaging as both a speaker and conversationalist.

I have to say, however, that I feel for people who work at Google. Based on my observations of three conversations involving Googlers, their conversation partners will immediately start speaking to them as if they represent the entire company once the affiliation bubbles to the surface of the conversation. I shudder to imagine what it would be like if every word people spoke to me was filtered through the context of my employer.

That said, I have two nuggets of wisdom gleaned from my forty odd minutes of group conversation with Chris among others. The first is that city of Portland, which has several opportunities for software engineers, is struggling with a heroin problem. The second is that if I want to perform industrial research at a company like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo!, I do not need a doctorate as many in the academic community suggested.

That pretty much scores on two counts for my girlfriend’s conceptualization of our collective destiny. Well, maybe one and a half taking into account the heroin issue, but that still beats two out of three, which ain't bad.