Abstract

Being an engineer at Google is a fantastic experience. Most people know about some of our perks such as free food and fabulous offices - but what's the work like? How does it compare with other environments? I've been at Google for just over five years, with about ten years of industry experience before that, so I've seen a bit of both sides. In this talk I'll try to address four questions:

• What challenges are particular to Google (and other companies of similar scale) which don't affect most environments?
• What challenges faced by smaller companies simply aren't a problem at Google?
• Where does software engineering still have significant issues which hurt everyone, regardless of scale?
• How can you get ahead of the game as a software engineer?

Bio

Jon Skeet is a Senior Software Engineer in Google's London office, where he's worked on Mobile Sync, Mobile Notifications, Windows Phone 7 Google Search App, and Google Offers. Beyond Google, he's better known for his is involvement in the C# community and particularly the Stack Overflow Q&A site. Jon has a maths degree and a diploma in computer science from "the other place."

This is the first event in our Learn to Code series!

Note: Remember to bring your laptop to these events!

About Learn to Code

During these events, there will be a mixture of interactive workshops and talks. We will be teaching you the basics of programming using Python. These events are good if you have zero coding experience, but they are also valuable if you already have started coding and would like to better your skills. We also welcome people who already have good coding experience as the more volunteers the better!

These events are always followed by our weekly Geek Night.

You can find out more information about this series of events over at ox.compsoc.net/learn

We also have a facebook group for discussion if you are taking part in this course: fb.com/groups/OXLearnToCode

...and a group for those who would like to volunteer: fb.com/groups/OXLearnToCodeHelpers