SELF on the Road - Seattle - Day 3

The First Day of Visits

In the morning we visited Google at their Fremont office on Lake Union. Our host, Caroline Danzi a recent graduate working on the Domain team, gave us a introduction to Google and their campus. The presentation outlined the interview process, the different Google sectors, and the many diverse career opportunities available Google. Afterwards, George Sadlier a Engineering Director and Site Reliability Engineer, talked about his experiences with Google, the work environment, and how google handles incident responses both within hardware and software. Next, we broke up into smaller groups with Google engineers, where we were able to ask more in-depth questions and receive a tour of the Google campus. At the end of the Google tour we were taken to one of the many cafeterias at the facility. We really enjoyed our trip to Google and were absolutely amazed by how unique and relaxed the work environment was.

Following our trip to Google we proceeded to bus down to the Mercedes Benz R&D Seattle office. We were greeted by Douglass and taken to the underground auto lab that was still being developed. The Mercedes Benz office has only been open since last November. The office is primarily used for back-end programming of the vehicle head units. Which is a transition from third party contracting to more of an inhouse design. This is fueled by the belief that inhouse built products are easier to update and allow for developers to work more autonomously on the vehicle. The visit allowed us to have a small group conversations with the Mercedes Benz engineers and discuss their day to day work life and career paths. Afterward, we regrouped as a large cohort and had a bigger Q&A session with the director of the Seattle office Mike Dosenbach. He had a lot of great advice regarding leadership, interviews, and work life balance. The visit to Mercedes Benz was very informative and we really appreciate the time they took to share their stories with us.