YAGI: Yet Another Google Interview
December 18, 2018
Google’s full page print advertisements about the free information the company makes available are awe inspiring. After reading the ad copy which reminds me I can learn something new every day, I recalled this interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
The Impact Lab shares an interview, originally published in the New York Times, with the company’s relatively new CEO in, “Sundar Pichai of Google: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’.” Sundar Pichai joined Google in 2004, where he proceeded to work on the Chrome browser. In 2014 he took the lead in R&D for products and platforms, and was elevated to CEO the next year. Last year, Pichai joined the board of Alphabet (Google’s parent company).
Writer David Gelles asks Pichai questions about his early life in India, his time at Stanford, and his own family’s approach to screen time, so see the article if curious. We are interested in what Pichai has to say about Google, and how things have changed. The interview relates:
You started at Google 14 years ago. Does it still feel like the same company you joined?
“When I first joined Google I was struck by the fact that it was a very idealistic, optimistic place. I still see that idealism and optimism a lot in many things we do today. But the world is different. Maybe there’s more realism of how hard some things are. We’ve had more failures, too. But there’s always been a strong streak of idealism in the company, and you still see it today.
We circled this statement:
An estimated 20,000 Googlers participated in a sexual harassment protest this month. What’s your message to employees right now?
“People are walking out because they want us to improve and they want us to show we can do better. We’re acknowledging and understanding we clearly got some things wrong. And we have been running the company very differently for a while now. But going through a process like that, you learn a lot. For example, we have established channels by which people can report issues. But those processes are much harder on the people going through it than we had realized.”
Really? That is an interesting take. The reigning CEO seems to be relentlessly focused on the positive, and on a message of constructive change. We shall see whether his actions reflect this perspective. Google itself may want to make sure that it is learning something new each day; for example, management methods which do more than generate clicks. The ad, of course, wants me to search Google for information. Nothing like clicks, right?
Cynthia Murrell, December 18, 2018
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