My GOOGLE INC. experience

By Elliot Duncker

Hello everybody,

Today, I would like to share a great experience I had with my class. As a matter of fact we were able to visit the Google’s office in Chicago, thanks to our great teacher, Valerie Beck. She introduced us

Matt Jones that has worked for 6 years there. And we learned a lot about this multinational firm and about one of our most important topics, mentoring. It was a great experience, because the company sticks really to those values and we were able to go through a lot of information.

Firstly let me tell you about Google.

Google's entrance  

Matt brought us into a conference room of the Chicago’s offices, to give a little presentation about what Google was, and what it was all about.

Headquartered in Dublin, this big company started at his first office in California in the tiny garage of Susan Wojcicki – who is now the CEO of Youtube by the way. Two IT passionate, Larry Page (Google) and Sergey Brin (Alphabet) founded it. Since 1998, Google is known as a constantly innovating company. The business really started to grow. They increased their value consistently to finally reach Wall Street’s stock options. Now, the firm has become Alphabet employing 54 000 employees around the world, including 700 in Chicago, 10 000 in New York and 12 000 in San Fransisco. It has over 70 offices and we had the chance to visit one of them.

Inside the offices everything is maid to increase the productivity of the employees. The working experience is great. The atmosphere seems very good as well. You have a lot of space to work. What I found amazing is that they had a lot of stuff maid to relax! Such as a massage chair and a machine that allows you to walk while working. They have quiet places were to rest or hold meetings or discuss. Matt has told us they had this funny habit during mealtime at noon. They lock people inside the cafeteria to force them to discuss and have social interactions. Personally I find it very clever. You can always get to know new people employed in the company, it helps for teamwork and moreover it can help you learn something new.

Mentoring for Google

A mentor towards his mentee is basically the same as a teacher to his student. The only difference is that a mentor teaches what the mentee wants to learn. The mentor will teach very practical stuff based on personal experiences and real life cases.

Matt Jones explained how Google, throughout its program favourites mentoring. It encourages leadership coaching internally and externally.

“It is all about making sure to help people”. Matt told us that Google Inc. encourages Global Rotation that provides a new cultural experience and a professional chance to explore the business. It organizes events for its employees, to relax them and to allow them to think about something else. It creates leadership opportunities for everyone.  As a matter of fact the firm wants his employees to be in a constant will of learning. So it proposes many professional benefits but it also encourages doing the same outside of the company. Indeed they force people to do something else not related to work. 20% of the time needs to be time spent outside of the company.

Picture with Matt Jones (center) our host

As last words I would say that Google Inc. is a great company it acts internally to promote innovation and productivity. Those strong values helped the firm develop throughout time. But it is also willing to help people from the outside. Its purpose is to organize the information to make it universally useful and accessible and its strategy to this is really well thought. Matt said that working for Google is a great experience although it was really hard work. But everyday is different and learning by being curious, making new contacts is a factor of success.

I would like to thank Matt Jones for the time he spent with us, and Valerie Beck our teacher for this experience.