Carnegie Mellon Networking Night - Silicon Valley at the Googleplex

I attended CMU Network Night Silicon Valley at the Googleplex last night.

I got there half an hour late and missed the talk of the first speaker. The meeting room was full of people. The 2nd speaker Joshua Bloch(the author of the book "Effective Java" which is one of my favorites) talked about his experience in Java and the usage of Java in Google. He also mentioned Google uses Python as well. I thought Google only uses C++.

During the socializing hour, I was glad to see and chat some of my schoolmates and faculty from CMU West. I graduated in last summer. But it felt like it has been a long time since I was out of school.

I believe there were many recruiters there. But only the ones from Google could hand out information packs as this event was held in Google's territory. It's just fun to talk to other CMU alumni to see what interesting things they are doing.

This was my first time inside a Googleplex building. I saw some un-ordinary things(at least to myself):

• There's a big projector that projects to the wall what search terms people are using at google.com(it seems to me the list is filtered as some of the most popular terms never show up there).
• Many workstations have dual 21in LCD monitor setup. That's awesome.
• Many people post jokes outside of their cubicles and offices.
• Many cubicles and offices are decorated with different personal touches. For instance, one office is full of toys hanging on the wall.
• Free drinks (varies soda, juice, tea, coffee), free snacks including oak meals
• There are toothpastes/toothbrushes/towels in men's room. Maybe people live in the office cause it has everything (food, drink, shower place).

Overall, it was a good networking night.

Tags: cmu google googleplex