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Thursday, February 22, 2007
Getting Into Google
Every computer geek in Phoenix wants a job at Google’s new office in nearby Tempe. But who has the hook-up? And what really goes on behind those big red doors?
BY JIMMY MAGAHERN
Reprinted from Phoenix magazine, December, 2006
Douglas Merrill draws back on a pool cue in the game room of Google’s new office in Tempe, Arizona and lets the shot fly, downing the 8-ball in the corner pocket with a resounding thud.
“I’d rather be lucky than good,” he says emphatically, reprising the signature quip of Lefty Gomez, a pitcher for the New York Yankees in the 1930s. Around him, the young new hires at the office laugh nervously, as if they’re assessing which of those two attributes – lucky or talented – the boss might be ascribing to them.
With his tall, lanky frame and longish black hair, Google’s 36-year-old vice president of engineering looks uncannily like a young Steve Jobs – that is, if the iconic Apple founder ever ditched his trademark black turtleneck for a hot-pink button-down number.
Certainly, Merrill’s perma-grin and perpetually charged style has a certain Jobsian quality, and more than a hint of Jobs’ intimidating drive. The point of Merrill’s impromptu billiards game is to loosen up the Tempe staff before meeting the press and local business leaders in the reception room. But he’s having a little trouble finding opponents to spar with, and no one’s volleying back his good-natured trash talk.
“The ongoing assumption around here is that you’re always the dumbest one in a room full of smart people,” offers David Hisson, who was recently hired as a technical troubleshooter for the Valley’s highly anticipated Google team. And Merrill, a former senior VP at Charles Schwab and information scientist for the Rand Corporation, who also holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton, clearly has smarts to spare.
Even more intimidating, however, is that, somehow, Merrill manages to balance all that geeky intelligence with a rock star’s magnetism.
“I took my shirt off in a photo shoot last month,” Merrill tells a young female photographer, explaining how he was talked into showing off his uber-geeky back tattoo of a 17th century rotor encryption cipher. “Thank god it was only Information Week!”
Merrill has come from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, tonight to launch, in grand Google style, the official opening of the company’s new office in Tempe, just a half-mile southeast of the ASU campus.
“We came to the Phoenix area because of the terrific talent that’s here,” Merrill says to the crowd gathered on the blue and red couches just off to the side of the company’s free-snack kitchen. “The talent is here because we have world-class universities. We have great companies. And we have a generally great quality of life.”
The celebration marks a coming-out party for Google, which has been operating in semi-secrecy since the early summer on the second floor of the University Services Building on Rural Road south of Apache Boulevard.
Jamie Casap, a project manager who came from Charles Schwab’s Phoenix office, admits Google has kept a deliberately low profile so far (as of press time, there was still no sign on the front of the building indicating that the internet giant resides there), but he says now that they’ve settled in, the company intends to play a more active role in the community.
“We don’t need to hang our name on a football stadium,” he says, with a wry smile. “But we want to be part of the community. Google’s excited about being here.”
Still, many in the tech community feel Google remains purposefully closed-off from the rest of the Valley.
“Everyone in Phoenix is like, ‘How do we interact with Google?” says Noel Gorelick, software manager at the ASU Mars Space Flight Facility, who got to work at both the Tempe and Mountain View offices while helping the company develop Google Mars. “And Google is on the other end, saying, ‘We want do stuff, but we hava to pick and choose.’ Even though Google is this multi-billion-dollar company, they tend to do everything on the cheap.”
Gorelick spent four months this year helping the Google Earth team adapt its winning interface to ASU-produced infrared imagery collected from the past two NASA Mars missions.
“It was a little weird at first,” he says. “You’d click the wrong button, and the U.S. interstate system appeared on Mars. Cool, but wrong.”
Merrill confirms working with the ASU Mars team and insists Google is reaching out to ASU and the University of Arizona to find other geniuses that might be lurking in the desert’s academia.
“Fundamentally, Google is a big talent game,” Merrill says. “Everything we do is about getting really great talent and applying it to really hard problems.”
Sometimes, Gorelick says, Google buys more brains than it needs. He says he’s got a standing job offer at the Tempe office, but has told them to let him know when they have an open position that’s cooler than his current one, which he describes as “sending stuff to Mars.”
Still, able brainiacs in the Valley are itching to bump into anybody in a Google T-shirt at the nearby Einstein Bros. or Chuckbox, or anywhere on campus.
“I literally have not run into anyone who works at Google,” says James Fee, a programmer at TEC Inc. in Tempe, who works in the geographic information systems (GIS) field and is a self-proclaimed Google Earth groupie.
“Maybe if they worked across the street at Fulton [the Fulton School of Engineering, where Google was originally rumored to be settling in], we might catch them sometimes at Panda Express. But they’re kind of separated from everybody over there. Plus, they’ve got those free lunches. I really think that they just don’t get out.”
Merrill admits the company’s well-known policy of providing free meals to employees is a sly way of keeping the crew focused on work.
“We give them food and an interactive environment to help people be creative with each other,” he says. But Merrill insists that, contrary to popular belief, the team does venture out of the building now and then.
“Part of the reason we chose Tempe was its great work/life balance. We want people to get out, go walk, go to the park. And our employees do that.”
Merrill, who says he visits the site at least every other week, even plans to start taking the crew for weekly walks, as they do at the Mountain View Googleplex. ‘So far, though, it’s been a little hot for that,” he says, laughing.
James Fee might be keeping an eye out for that procession of field-tripping Googlers outside his window, which overlooks Tempe’s “A” Mountain, but he doesn’t expect any of them will want to stop and talk shop. Google is notoriously tightlipped about its projects. At the so-called open house, security guards keep guests from wandering into office areas, and visitors entering the lobby must sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to breathe a word of anything they might see on computer monitors.
“I think everyone in town would be interested to know what they’re doing,” he says. “Everybody asks, ‘What are they doing over there? What’s going on?’ No one has a clue! And the Google people don’t blog.”
Merrill, who actually does blog (about everything from his latest tattoos to how he’s coping with the death of a loved one to cancer), believes Google is like a fine onion, or Bob Dylan. No matter how much is revealed, the world will always want to peel back another layer.
The Great Oz irony is that, behind the curtain, what’s actually going on at the Google office in Tempe may not be as interesting as everyone imagines.
During the party, while guests loosen up over free glasses of wine and Gordon Biersch lagers, one attendee, whose friend got to work in Tempe for a couple of months before being transferred to another Google office, makes a crucial slip.
“Part of what they’re hiring for here, specifically, is engineering its billing application,” he says matter-of-factly “Which is a very important application,” he quickly points out, noting that 90 percent of Google’s revenue is dependent on the application, which continually tweaks and streamlines the processing of customer payments in 51 different currencies in more than 100 countries.
Still, helping Google’s online customers pay their bills is not as sexy as letting them zoom around a 3-D Earth, or instantly locate original newspaper articles documenting 250 years of world events, as the new Google Archives enables.
Then again, that might be beside the point. The allure of working at Google, after all, has less to do with any particular project than it does with hanging out with fellow genius-types in a virtual candy shop.
That was the really cool thing about working here,” Gorelick tells Hisson at the party. “You’d be working on something, and a guy would ask you if you need help, and it would turn out he’s a Ph.D. physicist who worked on the same thing years ago. I got into a talk about Java with Josh Bloch – the guy who wrote Java! Right there at the lunch table!”
Hisson laughs. “You almost get used to that here,” he says. “It gets to a point where you gotta be careful about what applications you whine about because the developer might be sitting right across the lunch table from you.’”
BY JIMMY MAGAHERN
Reprinted from Phoenix magazine, December, 2006
Douglas Merrill draws back on a pool cue in the game room of Google’s new office in Tempe, Arizona and lets the shot fly, downing the 8-ball in the corner pocket with a resounding thud.
“I’d rather be lucky than good,” he says emphatically, reprising the signature quip of Lefty Gomez, a pitcher for the New York Yankees in the 1930s. Around him, the young new hires at the office laugh nervously, as if they’re assessing which of those two attributes – lucky or talented – the boss might be ascribing to them.
With his tall, lanky frame and longish black hair, Google’s 36-year-old vice president of engineering looks uncannily like a young Steve Jobs – that is, if the iconic Apple founder ever ditched his trademark black turtleneck for a hot-pink button-down number.
Certainly, Merrill’s perma-grin and perpetually charged style has a certain Jobsian quality, and more than a hint of Jobs’ intimidating drive. The point of Merrill’s impromptu billiards game is to loosen up the Tempe staff before meeting the press and local business leaders in the reception room. But he’s having a little trouble finding opponents to spar with, and no one’s volleying back his good-natured trash talk.
“The ongoing assumption around here is that you’re always the dumbest one in a room full of smart people,” offers David Hisson, who was recently hired as a technical troubleshooter for the Valley’s highly anticipated Google team. And Merrill, a former senior VP at Charles Schwab and information scientist for the Rand Corporation, who also holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton, clearly has smarts to spare.
Even more intimidating, however, is that, somehow, Merrill manages to balance all that geeky intelligence with a rock star’s magnetism.
“I took my shirt off in a photo shoot last month,” Merrill tells a young female photographer, explaining how he was talked into showing off his uber-geeky back tattoo of a 17th century rotor encryption cipher. “Thank god it was only Information Week!”
Merrill has come from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, tonight to launch, in grand Google style, the official opening of the company’s new office in Tempe, just a half-mile southeast of the ASU campus.
“We came to the Phoenix area because of the terrific talent that’s here,” Merrill says to the crowd gathered on the blue and red couches just off to the side of the company’s free-snack kitchen. “The talent is here because we have world-class universities. We have great companies. And we have a generally great quality of life.”
The celebration marks a coming-out party for Google, which has been operating in semi-secrecy since the early summer on the second floor of the University Services Building on Rural Road south of Apache Boulevard.
Jamie Casap, a project manager who came from Charles Schwab’s Phoenix office, admits Google has kept a deliberately low profile so far (as of press time, there was still no sign on the front of the building indicating that the internet giant resides there), but he says now that they’ve settled in, the company intends to play a more active role in the community.
“We don’t need to hang our name on a football stadium,” he says, with a wry smile. “But we want to be part of the community. Google’s excited about being here.”
Still, many in the tech community feel Google remains purposefully closed-off from the rest of the Valley.
“Everyone in Phoenix is like, ‘How do we interact with Google?” says Noel Gorelick, software manager at the ASU Mars Space Flight Facility, who got to work at both the Tempe and Mountain View offices while helping the company develop Google Mars. “And Google is on the other end, saying, ‘We want do stuff, but we hava to pick and choose.’ Even though Google is this multi-billion-dollar company, they tend to do everything on the cheap.”
Gorelick spent four months this year helping the Google Earth team adapt its winning interface to ASU-produced infrared imagery collected from the past two NASA Mars missions.
“It was a little weird at first,” he says. “You’d click the wrong button, and the U.S. interstate system appeared on Mars. Cool, but wrong.”
Merrill confirms working with the ASU Mars team and insists Google is reaching out to ASU and the University of Arizona to find other geniuses that might be lurking in the desert’s academia.
“Fundamentally, Google is a big talent game,” Merrill says. “Everything we do is about getting really great talent and applying it to really hard problems.”
Sometimes, Gorelick says, Google buys more brains than it needs. He says he’s got a standing job offer at the Tempe office, but has told them to let him know when they have an open position that’s cooler than his current one, which he describes as “sending stuff to Mars.”
Still, able brainiacs in the Valley are itching to bump into anybody in a Google T-shirt at the nearby Einstein Bros. or Chuckbox, or anywhere on campus.
“I literally have not run into anyone who works at Google,” says James Fee, a programmer at TEC Inc. in Tempe, who works in the geographic information systems (GIS) field and is a self-proclaimed Google Earth groupie.
“Maybe if they worked across the street at Fulton [the Fulton School of Engineering, where Google was originally rumored to be settling in], we might catch them sometimes at Panda Express. But they’re kind of separated from everybody over there. Plus, they’ve got those free lunches. I really think that they just don’t get out.”
Merrill admits the company’s well-known policy of providing free meals to employees is a sly way of keeping the crew focused on work.
“We give them food and an interactive environment to help people be creative with each other,” he says. But Merrill insists that, contrary to popular belief, the team does venture out of the building now and then.
“Part of the reason we chose Tempe was its great work/life balance. We want people to get out, go walk, go to the park. And our employees do that.”
Merrill, who says he visits the site at least every other week, even plans to start taking the crew for weekly walks, as they do at the Mountain View Googleplex. ‘So far, though, it’s been a little hot for that,” he says, laughing.
James Fee might be keeping an eye out for that procession of field-tripping Googlers outside his window, which overlooks Tempe’s “A” Mountain, but he doesn’t expect any of them will want to stop and talk shop. Google is notoriously tightlipped about its projects. At the so-called open house, security guards keep guests from wandering into office areas, and visitors entering the lobby must sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to breathe a word of anything they might see on computer monitors.
“I think everyone in town would be interested to know what they’re doing,” he says. “Everybody asks, ‘What are they doing over there? What’s going on?’ No one has a clue! And the Google people don’t blog.”
Merrill, who actually does blog (about everything from his latest tattoos to how he’s coping with the death of a loved one to cancer), believes Google is like a fine onion, or Bob Dylan. No matter how much is revealed, the world will always want to peel back another layer.
The Great Oz irony is that, behind the curtain, what’s actually going on at the Google office in Tempe may not be as interesting as everyone imagines.
During the party, while guests loosen up over free glasses of wine and Gordon Biersch lagers, one attendee, whose friend got to work in Tempe for a couple of months before being transferred to another Google office, makes a crucial slip.
“Part of what they’re hiring for here, specifically, is engineering its billing application,” he says matter-of-factly “Which is a very important application,” he quickly points out, noting that 90 percent of Google’s revenue is dependent on the application, which continually tweaks and streamlines the processing of customer payments in 51 different currencies in more than 100 countries.
Still, helping Google’s online customers pay their bills is not as sexy as letting them zoom around a 3-D Earth, or instantly locate original newspaper articles documenting 250 years of world events, as the new Google Archives enables.
Then again, that might be beside the point. The allure of working at Google, after all, has less to do with any particular project than it does with hanging out with fellow genius-types in a virtual candy shop.
That was the really cool thing about working here,” Gorelick tells Hisson at the party. “You’d be working on something, and a guy would ask you if you need help, and it would turn out he’s a Ph.D. physicist who worked on the same thing years ago. I got into a talk about Java with Josh Bloch – the guy who wrote Java! Right there at the lunch table!”
Hisson laughs. “You almost get used to that here,” he says. “It gets to a point where you gotta be careful about what applications you whine about because the developer might be sitting right across the lunch table from you.’”
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