A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate to catch a talk by Google’s Senior Engineering Director and Country Product Lead for Canada, Steve Woods. It was a talk on diversity in the context of Communitech’s Women in Technology Peer2Peer group.
My motivation for going was twofold. First, I’ve been working pretty hard with a talented crew on lighting up Maker Expo, which explains the dearth of posts here on makebright as most of my output has been diverted to the Maker Expo Blog. For that event we’ve put a lot of effort and thought into an honest attempt at diversity along the six dimensions of affluence, ethnicity, age, gender, locale, and makerly domain. Spoiler: in agreement with Woods, I can tell you diversity is difficult and necessary.
On the second count, I’m very curious about this giant and somewhat inaccessible force within our community called Google. I have a number of friends who work there, though like seasoned tech professionals we don’t talk about what we work on. I enviously watch the progress of the Google-hired mobile tire service on Joseph St. seasonally swapping employee tires twice a year. And I’ve even been upstairs for lunch in the Google cafeteria where I caught a glimpse of Myke Predko(!) demo’ing edu-bots for googlers (hey, I bought his Microchip PIC book back in the day and distantly shared organizational orbits of IBM Canada and RIM with him through my career). Yet still Google in its local instantiation at Victoria and Charles Streets is a mystery.
