Google Open House

19th May, 2006     Google, Life,

Tonight, Google held an Open House for people to go along to and help welcome in their new offices in Sydney. It was mainly a night of networking and getting to know people in Google Sydney offices.

It was a great night, and I must thank Google for opening up their doors and putting great food and drink, even if at times, it was a tad squishy :-)

I met some of the people behind Google Maps, as well as other projects, and was quite interesting to hear how passionate they are about their work. Some of the Google Desktop stuff, which I haven't played with, due to it being Windows centric mostly, looked rather impressive, and would be great if there could be Linux versions of it (However Beagle is trying to do something similar for the time being).

It is also worth noting, that it was mentioned that Google Maps now as of tonight (18th of May), has maps of Australia in it, not only satelite imagery. See this map of Sydney, for example. It doesn't yet let you do searches on landmarks tho. Coming soon I was told.

Having the ability there, to be able to quiz a Google employee on the work environment, and culture, was excellent, and really goes to prove how ultimately different the Google workplace is from elsewhere. I did also get to ask around about the news of the Google internships/university programs, and will be hoping to follow up contact with some people about that very soon.

At the end of the night, as we were leaving, everyone got a Google goodie bag, which contained, a Google flashing badge (as seen here), a pen, some advertising flyers for Jobs @ Google, a pad of Google Post-It notes. We also each got given a Google Open House T-Shirt.

So to recap:

• A fun night was had
• Met great people, google and non-google people
• Got some cool stuff

Hopefully someone will post up pictures of the night soon, and I can edit this article so have some relevant pictures ;-)

[Any typos, mistakes or things that don't make sense are because I was too-tired while typing this out :p]

Edit: I must say the shirts the google employees were wearing, were great! Basically it was the google logo, on black, with an image of a meat pie with peas, potato and gravy on it. As mentioned by one of the Google guys, it sure beats an image of a Kangaroo, Koala, Opera House or Harbour Bridge to represent Australia.