Friday, June 24, 2011

One year at Google





One year at Google and I have already relapsed into the corporate mode. Looking back, I have realized how much I have changed in a year. There are three of such noticeable changes that I thought was worthy to blog about.

  • I am so much lesser contentious than I was. I don't voluntarily participate in debates, arguments unless and until the argument directly affects my happiness or has the potential to change the way I see my day.

  • If there is an incredible personal achievement, it is getting over my aversion for data/maths. Remember the days of CATs when I would skip questions with tables and graphs? In the past 6 months, I have discovered what had gone wrong. Since all those scary math questions always dealt with calculations and seldom with logic, I have been looking at them in a very wrong way.

  • My Google moment of the day comes when I am sitting in a meeting with a huge graph and I make interpretations on the fly. It feels incredible to sweep lakhs of data points, find logical inconsistencies and also decide which data would support my arguments. I am hugely indebted to this place for making me realize a knack that I have always had. As I do more and more of data analyses, I feel that it is a pity in all these years, math was always about how "fast" I find a product rather than how smartly I do it.

  • My idea about what to respect in people has changed oh-so-much. I just learned to distance myself from anyone who make me grimace at the start of the day. It is so much more easier to pretend some people do not exist than pick up fights with the said people to prove a point.

  • Most of all, these days, I feel genuinely happy for others when good things happen to them. I think this is because I am very happy with how things have worked out for me. Trust me, this is my biggest personal achievement coming from a family who thrives on maddening amount of competition, putting freakish amount of pressure on everyone they know!
On a happy note, this year, I got

1) 1 "Gold Award"
2) 2 peer bonuses
3) an opportunity to work from Mountain View campus for a month (People who will be in CA during August, please let me know)



Also, this happened today :)

Some nice things that happened last year!



The work-station















The food















The football!