Tag Archives: Google

Trap Yates ’14, Google

Posted on by

Clutch­ing my pip­ing hot cof­fee, I peered out of the Star­bucks, strain­ing to see the far end of the build­ing that dom­i­nated the entirety of the block across the street. From my per­spec­tive it was impos­si­ble to do so, cre­at­ing the illu­sion that the struc­ture went on for­ever. This per­cep­tion was obvi­ously mis­lead­ing. The edi­fice that houses Google’s New York office, the company’s sec­ond largest, is not infi­nite, merely mas­sive. After spend­ing a day with Googlers in the office, how­ever, I’m not so sure the same clar­i­fi­ca­tion can be made regard­ing the ambi­tions, and the poten­tial, of the com­pany they comprise.

In the years since its foun­da­tion, Google has turned a kooky numer­i­cal value into a house­hold word. As such, I was clearly aware of the company’s impor­tance as I under­took the day’s adven­tures, but the point was merely ham­mered home as Seyi, the other Princetern, and I stepped off the ele­va­tor to find our­selves caught up in packs of tourists apply­ing their vis­i­tor pass stick­ers. Com­bined with the sight of employ­ees zoom­ing by on scoot­ers, being with my fel­low vis­i­tors ratch­eted up my excite­ment sev­eral notches. I felt I’d stepped into one of the coolest places to work in the world. I don’t think I was wrong.

Raj Hathi­ra­mani ’07 was our host for the day, which began with a brief look around a few floors of the office. The Google work­space is in of itself a work of art. Open and free flow­ing, it makes the most out of the unique archi­tec­ture of its space, which used to be home to the Port Author­ity. As Raj pointed out, very few of Google’s employ­ees have closed offices, and truly opaque doors are almost nonex­is­tent. It is truly a com­mu­nal work­space, con­ducive to inter­ac­tion, coop­er­a­tion, and lots of hard work. This atmos­phere is inten­si­fied by the reg­u­lar pres­ence of incred­i­bly well stocked snack bars and lounge areas, com­plete with pro­fes­sional grade espresso machines, for which there is an intro­duc­tory oper­at­ing class. The first of these areas that we walked through has more Legos than I have ever seen in my life, and col­or­ful toys and games are a ubiq­ui­tous pres­ence around the office. Even though I didn’t actu­ally see any Googlers play­ing with them, by their very pres­ence they light­ened the mood of the space, suf­fus­ing it with a live­li­ness that seemed to make its way into all of the bustling employees.

After our brief look around, we sat in one of these com­mu­nity spaces to chat a bit more about Raj’s posi­tion within Google’s Sales Ana­lyt­ics depart­ment. Par­tic­u­larly fas­ci­nat­ing was his expla­na­tion of AdWords, a prod­uct I knew very lit­tle about. See­ing the inside work­ings of AdWords gave me a new appre­ci­a­tion for the tech­nol­ogy I take for granted, and the ways in which my jumps around the inter­net are quan­ti­fied, noted, and then used to opti­mize my adver­tis­ing expe­ri­ence, both while search­ing Google and while perus­ing more gen­er­ally. The gen­eral Inter­net adver­tis­ing mar­ket is poised for explo­sive growth, much of which is being spurred by the work tak­ing place at Google. Raj dis­cussed these devel­op­ments, as well as his role in a small global team that con­ducts rev­enue analy­sis and opti­miza­tion for the dis­play busi­ness, for­mu­lat­ing rec­om­men­da­tions for sales and prod­uct teams based on their findings.

This team-focus was also a theme of the day, as we met with sev­eral of Raj’s co-workers to dis­cuss their roles in Google. The first such meet­ing of the day was with Lau­ren Car­pen­ter ’06, a Senior Account Man­ager who works with dis­play ads, which include the fun ban­ners that you may have seen above YouTube videos. Lau­ren spoke to us a bit about how she pitches dis­play ads, strate­gies she uses to build client rela­tion­ships, how her Prince­ton expe­ri­ence has informed and con­tributed to her work at Google, and why the orches­tra she runs and plays in out­side of work is named after King Herod’s daugh­ter. It was the first of what would prove to be sev­eral engag­ing, infor­ma­tive encoun­ters with Googlers.

The sec­ond was with Jesse, an Account Direc­tor at invite­me­dia, an orga­ni­za­tion Google recently acquired.  He was able to talk to us about some of the chal­lenges of cre­at­ing and run­ning a start-up, a process he has been inti­mately involved with sev­eral times, and some of the details of display-ad trad­ing. The eas­i­est trans­la­tion he made for my layman’s ear was that dis­play ads can be traded much like stocks, and that his par­tic­u­lar work has been in invent­ing and pol­ish­ing sys­tems whereby this trad­ing takes place. It was very cutting-edge stuff, and was another ter­rific oppor­tu­nity to glance behind the cur­tain of Oz.

After these meet­ings and a bit of gen­eral ques­tion time with Raj, we headed to Google’s cafe­te­ria for lunch. I was in no way pre­pared for the boun­ti­ful cor­nu­copia of delec­table edi­bles that awaited me, and I think an employee or two actu­ally con­fused my eyes for the cafeteria’s plates as I ogled at the plen­ti­ful options. To avoid too exten­sive a reverie, it will suf­fice to say lunch was deli­cious. We were also able to chat with Raj a bit more about his Prince­ton expe­ri­ence, includ­ing his time as an RCA and with Naa­cho, his inter­na­tional job expe­ri­ence, and his Iron­man train­ing. I found out later that he was lit­er­ally a leg­endary RCA, and the descrip­tion for his old room in Walker men­tions him specif­i­cally as one of the room’s great­est res­i­dents: quite an inspi­ra­tional fig­ure for a bushy-tailed Prince­ton sophomore.

From lunch we sur­veyed a bit more of the office while con­tin­u­ing our dis­cus­sion, includ­ing a jaunt to a dig­i­tal library that may have been the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. The entire wall is a screen depict­ing a cir­cu­lar book­case, which one rotates with a sim­ple wave of your hand along the screen’s sur­face. Select a book, and set­tle in. There were also nap-pods behind the shelves, although evi­dently for light­ing, noise, and heat rea­sons they are infe­rior to the nap­ping sta­tions that are installed a bit higher in the build­ing. This kind of del­i­cate, detail-oriented care for employee well­ness amazed me through­out the day, and I wouldn’t hate to see some of these ele­ments adopted in areas around cam­pus, for instance, in my com­mon room.

We had a chance to look at the engi­neer­ing side of things when we met with Michael Schid­lowsky ‘01 who works on Google Docs. Although some of the tech­ni­cal things he went into were some­what over my head, he pre­sented us with a fresh per­spec­tive on Google, and the ways in which a Prince­ton edu­ca­tion can impact work expe­ri­ence. He also proved to be a font of gen­eral advice, some of which I have already taken, and more of which I intend to pur­sue in the futureTo wrap up the day, we met with Arnaud, who works with Google.org, the non­profit arm of Google that man­ages a fairly huge amount of non-profit work. I had no idea what Google.org was until doing a bit of research on Google for this Princetern­ship, and I was fas­ci­nated to hear more about the kind of sup­port Google has for non­prof­its, as well as its own pro­grams. It is def­i­nitely a resource that I will be keep­ing in mind as I con­sider work in a non­profit sector.

And with that our day at Google wound to a close. It was a fairly rev­e­la­tory expe­ri­ence, and one I am incred­i­bly thank­ful to have had. It was fur­ther con­fir­ma­tion that the sort of skills we learn here at Prince­ton, and par­tic­u­larly those acquired out­side of class, can be put to use in a busi­ness set­ting. Google is exactly the kind of casual but hard-working envi­ron­ment I find myself drawn to and inspired by, and being sur­rounded by thou­sands of moti­vated, ded­i­cated peo­ple going about their work was an invig­o­rat­ing expe­ri­ence, pro­vid­ing just that extra bit of moti­va­tion to get through the finals grind.

Judy (Zhuyi) Sun ’14, Google

Posted on by

For my Princetern­ship at Google in NYC, I was hosted by Raj Hathi­ra­mani ’07, and vis­ited with another Princ­tern, Bran­don Rhodes ‘14.  Dur­ing our Princetern­ship we were given the oppor­tu­nity to meet employ­ees in var­i­ous depart­ments and hear their per­spec­tives and roles at Google. I had the chance to meet employ­ees in indus­tries rang­ing from adver­tis­ing to engi­neer­ing to finan­cial analy­sis to com­mu­nity service.

First, I met Andrew, who was in sales as a dis­play real-time bid­ding sales account exec­u­tive. He had a very uncon­ven­tional path to Google, where he was actu­ally hired for an adver­tis­ing startup that was bought by Google. Before get­ting into the nitty-gritty of what he actu­ally does, he gave me a brief overview of the indus­try. Orig­i­nally, adver­tis­ing hap­pened between com­pa­nies, but there were only so many lunches and calls one can sched­ule in a day — there was a limit on time. So came the mid­dle man. The mid­dle man, the adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies, started to gain ground by being the sole con­tact to the pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies, which solves the issue with time, but the com­pa­nies would never knew how much profit the mid­dle man was mak­ing. Now Andrew’s team elim­i­nates the mid­dle man to cut costs for the com­pa­nies. He works with the real-time bid­ding sales, essen­tially the stock mar­ket of adver­tis­ing, really inter­est­ing stuff!  After this con­ver­sa­tion our alum Raj talked to us more about adver­tis­ing — the schemat­ics of it really: cost per click, per impres­sion, per action — and how he works in rev­enue analy­sis for many dif­fer­ent projects at Google.

I also briefly met Arnaud, the project man­ager for google.org, the sec­tor of Google that works with non­prof­its and com­mu­nity ser­vice. He describes his job in three metaphors. Being a project man­ager is like being a shrink, hav­ing to be the bridge between dif­fer­ent peo­ple and dif­fer­ing opin­ions. It’s also like being a head coach, gain­ing respect from the play­ers and pup­peteer­ing the sit­u­a­tion from behind the scenes. It’s also like being a movie direc­tor, tak­ing resources and cre­at­ing a prod­uct from those resources, as well as know­ing when cre­ativ­ity is effec­tive and when it is detrimental. 

Lastly, I met Manja, a soft­ware engi­neer of Google — one of the bet­ter known posi­tions. He works in the more geo/local aspects (ie. Google Maps). Manja talked more about his past and cur­rent projects. For exam­ple, he worked on the new release on Google Maps Restau­rants. When you look on your Android phone for restau­rants, you can now see a string of words directly under the basic infor­ma­tion (ie. long lines (dot) food net­work (dot) ravi­oli (dot) but­ter­nut squash soup). This tells you the key words and phrases that show up in reviews, which saves a lot of Yelp scrolling and read­ing time, so thank Manja!

Judy at Google!

The cul­ture and envi­ron­ment at Google was amaz­ing; I really do see why peo­ple say it is the “Best Place to Work.” There was a game room with video games, ping pong, gym equip­ment, foos­ball, and a pool table; snack sta­tions every few feet; three (free and ridicu­lously good) cafe­te­rias; lots of loung­ing room for relax­ing or even meet­ings with cowork­ers. The peo­ple are very happy so there­fore work effi­ciently; Google got it down! I learned so much on this trip. For those ORFE majors not inter­ested in Wall St, it was excit­ing to see other paths! It’s now that I real­ize exactly how applic­a­ble ORFE is to any indus­try, and I need not box myself in and just look at oppor­tu­ni­ties in finance. It was def­i­nitely an eye-opening expe­ri­ence; I had no idea that Google NYC was so big and had so many non-technical posi­tions. I def­i­nitely rec­om­mend Princetern­ship for any­one who’s curi­ous about an indus­try, espe­cially as a viable future career path.

Wendy Pan ’14, Google

Posted on by

Wednes­day, Feb­ru­ary 1, 2012

Prior to the first day of my Princetern­ship, my host, Suzanne Spence (Soci­ol­ogy ’04) put sev­eral events on my Google cal­en­dar so I would have a sense of what to expect dur­ing my two days at Google.  On Wednes­day morn­ing, I arrived at the Google office in New York City after a com­mute of an hour and a half from Prince­ton Junc­tion.  After meet­ing Suzanne, I was intro­duced to Meg­gie, who was sched­uled to give me a tour of the Google office.  Meg­gie is an Account Exec­u­tive from the Adver­tis­ing Department.

Google’s New York City office actu­ally encom­passes two build­ings.  One build­ing was pur­chased (entirely) by the com­pany a few years ago and is now under­go­ing a tran­si­tion period.  Com­pa­nies that pre­vi­ously bought space in the build­ing are grad­u­ally mov­ing out as their leases expire and Google is con­vert­ing more and more of the build­ing to space for its employ­ees.  The other build­ing sits across the street, right above Chelsea Mar­ket, and houses most of the Adver­tis­ing divi­sion.  I spent roughly the same amount of time in each building.

Dur­ing the tour of Google, a cou­ple things stood out for me.  Employ­ees’ work­spaces were col­or­ful and dec­o­rated.  There were stuffed ani­mals on people’s desks, dec­o­ra­tions hang­ing from the ceil­ing, life-size mod­els of TV char­ac­ters, and other per­sonal touches.   On one table, there was a Lego model of a QR code that at one point actu­ally worked.  Many hall­ways were lined with a row of scoot­ers and exer­cise balls.

It was also clear that Google cares about the well­be­ing of its employ­ees.  I learned about the infor­mal “150 feet rule:” Google believes that at no point should an employee be more than 150 feet away from food.  Between the two build­ings, there are a cou­ple of cafe­te­rias where employ­ees take their meals.  On each floor, there are a few micro-kitchens were employ­ees can go any­time for cof­fee, drinks, and an assort­ment of healthy snacks (nuts, trail mix, fruit).

Towards the end of my tour, Meg­gie told me more about her role at Google.  She is an Account Exec­u­tive who works with Google’s clients to iden­tify which Google prod­ucts would work best for them.  She works in Enter­tain­ment (Account Exec­u­tives also work in Edu­ca­tion, Travel, and a vari­ety of other indus­tries), so her clients were TV sta­tions and pro­duc­tion companies.

After­wards, I had lunch with a few other employ­ees and sat in on two meet­ings.  At both meet­ings, employ­ees con­verged in a room that was reserved before­hand and was equipped with a large mon­i­tor.  The meet­ings were then con­ducted via video, with the same tech­nol­ogy found in Google Hang­out.  These ses­sions pro­vided Googlers from dif­fer­ent offices a way to col­lab­o­rate conveniently. 

Thurs­day, Feb­ru­ary 2, 2012

Suzanne Spence and Wendy

On the sec­ond day of my Princetern­ship, I met with five dif­fer­ent Googlers and attended a speaker event.

I first met with Ari, who works in the Cre­ative depart­ment at Google, which is nick­named The Zoo.  A lot of her work encom­passes YouTube adver­tis­ing cam­paigns.  She showed me a cou­ple exam­ples of recent projects, includ­ing a YouTube chan­nel that is spon­sored by Dodge Durango that fea­tured Super Bowl ads on the day of the game.  Ari said that within The Zoo, there are a vari­ety of posi­tions – some do the more tech­ni­cal and artis­tic work while oth­ers are con­sul­tants or work directly with customers. 

Next, I met with Lau­ren, who works in Adver­tis­ing.  She was also a Prince­ton alumna and we spent a good deal of time talk­ing about how Prince­ton and Google are alike in many ways – both pro­vide lots of resources for their students/ employ­ees and encour­age peo­ple to do things other than work.  Out­side of her work at Google, Lau­ren also man­ages a pro­fes­sional orches­tra, and felt it very impor­tant that her job also let her pur­sue her passions. 

Before going to lunch with Suzanne, I had a chat with Pit, who does Ana­lyt­ics for the Edu­ca­tion depart­ment.  Most of his cus­tomers are var­i­ous col­leges and schools.  We talked a lot about the advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of work­ing at a big com­pany like Google.  While it’s easy to see why work­ing at Google would have many plusses, being at a small com­pany or startup gives peo­ple the oppor­tu­nity to do a greater range of things and mas­ter more skills quickly.

After lunch, I met with Jon, who works on Invite Media.  His work involved Google tech­nolo­gies that allow busi­nesses to buy ad space on web­sites effi­ciently.  He talked about how Google has tools that allow busi­nesses to tar­get spe­cific groups of con­sumers in their ads.  For instance, after vis­it­ing a cer­tain web­site, view­ers might see ads around the Inter­net that fea­ture that web­site or related sites. 

After meet­ing with Jon, Suzanne and I attended an event that was part of Techtalk, a series of lec­tures where Google invites out­side speak­ers.  This time, the guests were James Ram­sey and Dan Barasch, and their pre­sen­ta­tion was on their Delancey Under­ground project.  In an effort to bring more green space into New York City, they hoped to con­vert the aban­doned under­ground trol­ley ter­mi­nal beneath Delancey Street into an indoor park.  One of the most inter­est­ing tech­no­log­i­cal aspects of their project was their plan to fil­ter nat­ural sun­light into the under­ground park using fiber optics. 

My last meet­ing of the day was with Beth, who works in Mar­ket­ing.  Hav­ing done a mar­ket­ing intern­ship last sum­mer, I shared many of her inter­ests.  We talked a lot about career paths for peo­ple who like adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing.  Beth, like Pit, also pointed out the advan­tages of work­ing at a smaller com­pany or adver­tis­ing firm, where each indi­vid­ual employee worked on “smaller” projects (than the cam­paigns Google does) but took more own­er­ship and had more con­trol in the projects. 

Over­all, my Princetern­ship expe­ri­ence was very reward­ing and taught me a lot not just about the com­pany, but also pos­si­ble career paths for some­one inter­ested in adver­tis­ing and marketing.

Seyi Lawal ’15, Google

Posted on by

My day as a Princetern started off with a train ride to New York City and a short walk over to Google’s New York head­quar­ters. There, I met my alumni host, Raj Hathi­ra­mani, a 2007 Prince­ton graduate.I was imme­di­ately taken with the envi­ron­ment at Google. Despite all of the work that I knew to be going on there, Google was relaxed and wel­com­ing. A few hours into my day, it stopped being odd see­ing employ­ees whizzing down the hall­ways on Google scoot­ers, or peo­ple get­ting from one floor to another by climb­ing a lad­der or slid­ing down a fire pole. Dress was quite casual, which fur­ther con­tributed to the relaxed atmosphere.

My alumni host took me on a tour of the build­ing, show­ing me where employ­ees in dif­fer­ent divi­sions of Google worked, and other cool areas of his work place, includ­ing the game room, nap loca­tions, a vir­tual library, and mas­sage rooms. I also noticed that the very open envi­ron­ment at Google was reflected in the design of the work place. There were very few closed doors, actu­ally very few doors in gen­eral, in the work­space. Employ­ees worked in groups, where every group mem­ber was in the same loca­tion, and worked in adjoin­ing spaces, in order to fos­ter a col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment. It also seemed like Google really val­ued its employ­ees and took great care to ensure that all of their needs were taken care of, so that all they had to do was be cre­ative, inno­v­a­tive, and get work done. From my dis­cus­sions with my alumni host, and other Googlers, I learned how true this was.

Raj and I then had a con­ver­sa­tion about what exactly he does at Google. Raj works as an ana­lyst in dis­play adver­tis­ing. Basi­cally, he helps enable opti­mal sell­ing of dis­play ads that you see on Google search engines and Google owned pages. He explained a sys­tem called Google AdWords, which offers ad spaces to busi­nesses and cor­po­ra­tions. As an ana­lyst, Raj also works to model rev­enue from new prod­ucts and allo­cate resources based on prof­itabil­ity met­rics to pri­or­i­tize strate­gic invest­ments. He works closely with the prod­uct and engi­neer­ing teams as well on effi­cient data infra­struc­ture in order to max­i­mize gains for both Google and its cus­tomers. Besides telling me about his main work and answer­ing any and all ques­tions I had, Raj also told me about Google’s “20-percent-time.” Google allows, no encour­ages, its engi­neers to spend 20% of their time at work on any project or idea they are pas­sion­ate about, that is in any way related to Google. As a Prince­ton Alum, Raj had con­sid­ered the idea of bring­ing lan­guage tables to Google, since there were many Googlers who wanted to learn new lan­guages, and plenty of lan­guages are rep­re­sented in this work­place. Raj also spoke to me about his time at Prince­ton, and com­pared the envi­ron­ment at Google to that of Prince­ton, say­ing that every­thing that you need to thrive at both loca­tions is given to you. Sur­pris­ingly I learned that not only did Raj and I live in the same res­i­den­tial col­lege, I also am cur­rently liv­ing in the same room he lived in when he was an RCA!

After describ­ing more about his job, Raj took me to meet four other Googlers who worked on dis­play enter­tain­ment sales,invite media sales, as a Google Docs engi­neer, and on google.org (the branch of Google that is for non­prof­its and works with cri­sis response and dis­as­ter aid). Through my dis­cus­sions with each one of them, I noticed com­mon themes of cre­ativ­ity, team based work, and a sat­is­fac­tion with the work they were doing. They all had lives out­side of Google, and noted that work at Google fits with their lives, and doesn’t take it over. Mike, the Google Docs engi­neer, told me that many employ­ees set their own work times, some­times choos­ing to work from home on some days. One thing Mike said that really stood out to me was that, even though Google is this huge busi­ness, to him, it still felt like a small company.

Seyi and fel­low Princetern Trap

As a fresh­man, I came into this Princetern­ship hop­ing to just gain some insight into a career field I could pos­si­bly see myself pur­su­ing. I was so grate­ful that Raj, my host, took me to meet with Googlers in other fields so I could get a sense of some of the other capac­i­ties in which one can work at Google. My expe­ri­ence at Google, and what I learned from speak­ing with some of the employ­ees there, is actu­ally caus­ing me to con­sider a major change, as I saw a field I can truly see myself work­ing in. Google is an awe­some place, and I strongly encour­age other stu­dents to con­sider going on this Princetern­ship. It was an eye-opening expe­ri­ence for me and can give you knowl­edge about a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent career paths. I am truly thank­ful to Raj for tak­ing the time out of his busy work sched­ule to give me this won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity, and to all of the amaz­ing peo­ple I met and spoke with dur­ing my Princeternship.