Visiting the Google Campus

Last Thursday we visited Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Its mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” To this end, they employ about 20,000 people located all around the world from a variety of disciplines.

Our lively host, Derek Parham, kindly toured us around the campus and showed us all the things that make Google special and set it apart from any other company. These things include free (and healthy) food, swimming pools, relaxation areas, free bikes for quick commuting and projects that have come out of the famous “Google 20 percent time”. This last trait has stimulated the creation of many things that have improved the company and have even been made into new Google applications like Gmail, Google News and Google Talk.

A little-known characteristic of Google is that ever since they started, they have focused on buying a lot of expendable cheap technology. Knowing that less reliable technology is likely to fail has actually helped them create systems that are very fault tolerant. Whenever a hard drive fails they just replace it, knowing that the information is stored in the cloud and can be recovered.

Part of Google’s success has been its ability to come up with new features in a short amount of time. What helps drive this rapid innovation is Google’s horizontal management structure, where developers do not have a lot of organizational overhead and are able to quickly get feedback from the high management, even the founders themselves.

We ended our Google expedition with a Q&A session featuring our very own Maddy’s brother Manoj Koushik from the Marketing department and Naresh Kumar who works as an engineer. Together with Derek they really helped us understand the many different sides that make up Google and how they do the amazing work that makes our lives easier every day.

This past week we had the unique pleasure of visiting a company near and dear to one of our very own faculty members, Carl Rosendahl. Initially founded in 1994 by director and producer Steven Spielberg, former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, and music executive David Geffen, DreamWorks SKG (Spielberg Katzenberg Geffen) is an American film studio which develops, produces, and distributes films, television shows, and video games.

Shortly after its founding, DreamWorks partnered with Pacific Data Images (PDI), which Carl founded in 1980, to produce their first animated film, “Antz”. In early 2000, Carl sold PDI to DreamWorks SKG, where they continue to develop animated films such as “Shrek” and the upcoming “How to Train Your Dragon.”

We walked into the building and were met with a flurry of activity as employees from various health programs championed PDI/DreamWorks’ initiative for a healthier company. Yoga, gyms, and even boxing, the works (no pun intended). Our tour was led by Jim Conrads, Global Outreach Supervisor at PDI/DreamWorks. He led us to the company cafeteria where we ate lunch and enjoyed talking with ETC alumni who currently work there.

In the lobby with Po

After lunch, we were treated to a special screening of clips from one of their upcoming movies. Afterward, we watched an interesting presentation on the work of a technical director at PDI/DreamWorks, complete with a class-wide session of “technical director for a day,” where we watched clips of movies and were tasked with identifying problems and asked to provide solutions. It was extremely thought-provoking and provided good insight into their day-to-day work.

We spent the final moments of the tour learning about PDI/DreamWorks’ pipeline, which is both expansive and thorough. It’s amazing to see such a large and intricate machine produce such a polished product, and it certainly is staggering to think about the amount of work required to create just a single film.

Many thanks to PDI/DreamWorks for opening its doors to us, and a special thanks to Jim Conrads for the personalized attention given to us from beginning to end!