How Google is working with students - Sunnyvale DSC Summit ‘19

Key Takeaways

[Applause] very great to get a chance to meet all of you are already had a couple good conversations to hear the unique challenges you all face so I have kind of one of the coolest jobs in the world in that I get to work with a team that is engaged with developers all around the world so people in pretty much any any area of the world big countries big small countries rural urban people who are trying to figure out how to use technology to solve problems they see and what we see is as our programs now reach over a million developers in person every year we have actual groups and and face-to-face contact with folks in 140 countries around the world and it's truly inspiring to see the work that these teams do and importantly the feedback that by working with them we're able to get one of the things that we as a team as you were just hearing really value is the connection that we get both as being able to enable people but also to understand what we're doing right and wrong as you know as Google we're here we have people I think are our team as people in 32 countries but many of the products are built far away from where the people are using this so it's really useful for us to actually hear I was talking to somebody a few minutes ago who's at a AG school and a lot of the folks they are coming at coming to the to their day by day challenges with a different set of problems than a Google engineer sitting in this building in Sunnyvale and so how do we bring that back how do we bring those those experiences and concerns and say hey this works really great for people who are solving this kind of problem but really doesn't work for me here so that is an important role that we feel we have as a team and you can always help us with that by bringing that feedback to us so today I really want to as well welcome all of you and thank you for making the time to come out here I definitely recognize that long ago if you can believe it long ago is actually a student and I will actually organize student groups in a regional across multiple states and saw how difficult it is the task that you all are taking on how do you get people to come to meetings how do you work the university how do you think about success secession and and how you'll actually keep the group going after you leave and you're all really hard challenges and you're trying to do it at the same time as you're actually trying to go to school and and learn your own skills so I want to thank you and and hopefully you'll see that what we're trying to do with this program is help you learn the skills that will be useful for you to take the many of the theoretical things you've been learning and actually put them into practical work so some of you may have seen this this gives a sense of some of the things you can do with what you learn and lately I've been into machine learning using convolutional neural networks I don't know why you're laughing at me since childhood she's always wanted to know everything why is that how is that what does it do she just wants to be always learning moving doing different stuff I haven't always been into computer science but my mom grows rose bushes in my front yard every season they get disease and then my mom and I would have to diagnose it knowing Chezza she wanted to do something about it I had the idea as a potential thing I could do for my research class with Miss Sun why anyone would sit around their summer vacation teaching a machine to identify plants not sure but that was what she wanted to do I wanted to have a way people could diagnose plant diseases just by taking a photo of it and so that's when I started looking into tensorflow I'd watch different tutorials and read blog post every night Chaza took it upon herself to do all the background research necessary and start to ask what can this really do plant MD it works when the user takes a picture of the plant and it tells you what plant it is and whether it's healthy or diseased and if it is diseased what disease it is my first question was is it an app that's only on your phone and she's like no somebody has downloaded this app and using it that was like wow something that I just was so proud I don't think you have to be a super genius to get into coding really anyone can do it with an idea and with perseverance I feel like open-source technology and the wealth of information on the Internet is empowering my generation I know that I can do anything I put my mind to and so can anybody else so I imagine all of you have have seen their know of examples or have had that yourself where things you the idea that you have you have some problem you're excited about or interested in and you can start applying the things you've learned to it the team asked if maybe I could share some my own personal journey and how and that may be that might be a helpful thing just to understand ace how a path can happen through the world of technology and I would certainly say my path has been a a widely weaving one so they have not even seen these slides so I'm sorry if there you be the judge long ago I was like many kids interested in lots of different stuff this is when I was 11 and I could have gone any different direction at that point I had lots of things I thought were interesting but I was pretty lucky that my father actually thought for some reason that I might be interested in computers and so as an 11 year old he signed me up for a Community College coding program and which I stood out in but it really when I got when I actually sat down and started coding it it showed it created this whole new world of wow you can put whatever you want and control this thing to make it do all sorts of things and so within a year I had a bulletin board with that with hundreds of users and I was I was coding on my own and enjoying it but there weren't any kind of communities really at that point except for bulletin boards and so there wasn't a lot of easy way for me to continue learning and so my I would say progression sort of didn't go very far after that for a while until when I was in college you know the internet had been around for a while since the 70s but something happened in the early 90s that transformed it and I'm sure you all know I'm talking about the worldwide gopher network so when the web came out actually just around the same time maybe a little bit earlier something called gopher came out which was to me transformational it was the first time you had the idea that you could look at a menu of items and you have no idea where they are they could be anywhere in the world you could say one line is to a connection to a computer system in Copenhagen and other searches and ways texts index of a system in Virginia and so we my friends and I put together an environmental thing we called eco gopher where we index mailing lists of environmental information found all the time all the fact sheets on toxic chemicals in the world from the EPA and such and made that all available and that was like 92 and for me that was the the world changed and all of a sudden there were opportunities that hadn't been there before and I say this because guess what this continues to happen and I would argue it happens faster and faster so for me I was not about knowing how to program on an Apple 2 plus that was the valuable skill it was knowing how to recognize when interesting things were happening and there was opportunities to change so I actually left hopped out of school and started a company so I and my company was focused on I was pretty stylish back then as you can tell and my company was focused on the idea of open data I had already seen that there is all these amazing things if you just make information available then you can start cutting and slicing and putting it together in ways that haven't been thought of before and so we started working we did programs projects the government and we did things with big companies and we were always trying to figure out what was our product gonna be what we're gonna be able to make that was interesting and this was 96-97 reasonably early and so I would say at that point kind of viewed as if people were to talk to me and say oh this is a data guy he knows all about how to cut and slice data but we ended up what we put together ended up being really valuable and interesting to a company called Alta Vista which probably most of you have never had never used but if you can imagine there was a time when Google was not the top search company it was ultimate it was sort of the first big search engine that came out and so my friends and I who had built this company we all moved out to California and at that point I was really as I got into that company people said oh this person Jason he's he's the search guy I ran the core Search Search Indexing team for Alta Vista later on I went to Yahoo they wanted to add search to Yahoo Mail so I built search for yahoo mail and so I was how is the search guy but uh but I wasn't I was the person who was interested in interesting problems and pretty soon I ended up overseeing sort of a messenger email and a bunch of things that were happening there and when I got bored with that my family and I moved to London and I started working on a little app called Shazam which hopefully some of you have heard of and and that was interesting because it was where technology suitably advanced technology felt like magic to users like it was not it was not the goal was not to make something complex with you know powerful algorithms and all this it was that but the goal was to make something that in a simple easy way solved user problems and that's what drew me to it and so I spent a fair amount of time really looking at how do you make that pass how do you make that easy you know it was a whole new thing and then I was actually I routinely ended up going to big music industry events and the Grammys and all of this and folks would say oh he's you know Jason he's a music industry guy and so it's interesting how as as you follow your interest if you if you follow your interest you can actually be whoever you know you can be true to yourself but you get to it's you shouldn't let yourself be sort of shoehorned into a particular role so for example then I came to Google and I was working on social products and at some forum people were saying you know hey here's all the things we're doing for developers and it's it's really amazing and I was like hey new guy here actually it's not all amazing I can think of but this doesn't work that doesn't work what are we gonna do about that and a little bit of career advice sometimes that kind of thing can get you in trouble so a couple weeks later sundar who's now our CEO came by and said you seem to have some ideas on what we should be doing about around developers why don't you start a group focused on making to Google great for developers and so that's really what I've been doing since then for about the last four and a half years and what as I as I mentioned in the end that ends up being about one of the coolest jobs I know of and certainly one of my favorite things I've ever been able to do because it gives me a chance to work with folks like yourselves all around the world so I hope that gives you a an idea of a path and I want to reiterate that the thing that is I think people the trap that people fall into is thinking that because they're good at one thing that they should just keep doing that thing and I would just always to encourage you to keep learning and as you work you're in such a great spot to be meeting lots of different people skill sets see what other people think is interesting because often that's where you're going to find the signal of what the next big thing is or the next big opportunity for you so now that I'm here and I get to work with our Google developers team all around the world I want to help you understand a little bit of how what you're doing as DSC leads connects into a broader community so beyond DSC we also have a number of community programs so you know we have women techmakers where we have over a hundred thousand women around the world who we support with programs and speakers and resources we have our Google developer experts program where we actually help folks in the community had find that folks who are experts in particular areas and then they share their knowledge with other with others around the world and I can say in each of these areas I have met amazing folks I certainly like I can remember meeting gdes and Jakarta and and Lagos and all around who blown me away both with their knowledge and their passion and then we have our GDG groups which are actually all around the world and are probably the most similar directly with what you're doing in DSC that's what we want to really encourage you to be thinking both that you know what you're working on now and how you're engaged with working with your students at your university but also consider that going forward there's always opportunities to to connect with these broader communities and it should be a great opportunity to look at are there other ways to have folks who are at a university that has many people who go off to the town they're in or a big city nearby that it's probably worthwhile to reach out to the the GD G's in those areas and the G des as well and see if maybe share speakers interact because I think that will probably be interesting for for you interesting for them and probably create a lot of opportunities for both increased learning as well as in reality a lot of great opportunities to network that can help in your career and the career of the folks in your group so with that I want to thank you this is I hope will be very useful and then as was said this is both the chance for you to learn some things about how to do what you're doing better but also to give real honest feedback on what we can do better going this is an early program and I think it has immense future based on all the great work you're doing thank you [Applause]