One thing that struck me as very interesting in I’m Feeling Lucky, was the nonchalant
attitude you sense from all the employees and founders in the startup stages of
Google. When Douglas Edwards explains early on how Jay asks him to look at
something, “ …standing in the micro-kitchen eating from a cup of yoghurt,
barefoot and sporting pajama pants, a well-loved sweatshirt, and a graying
ponytail”[1] and it turns out to be a miniature roller coaster that he had made over two
sets of desks. It reminded me of this attitude that many of these Silicon
Valley, startup guys have going as far back to the master of tech guys, Claude
Shannon. Shannon, though revolutionary with creating coding, was always
interested in the comedy within technology. It seems this is a common theme for
many of these groundbreaking types.
Another interesting dynamic is how Google opposed to
Apple is all about the, “Change, change, change. Charge ahead. No back”[2] as
explained by Edwards. Though the Google products and software is not yet
completely developed, their products are available; they are ever changing in
different ways. Rarely is there a perfected Google product released on the
market that isn’t altered down the road. Opposite compared to a company
such as Apple.
The most characteristically interesting description I
found from Edwards is about systems administrator, Jim Reese. “Something about
him reminded me of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man: the open and friendly attitude,
hair parted way over on one side, the whiff of geekiness I detected as he
crawled under my desk, whipped out a screwdriver and started adeptly fiddling
with one of the jacks … it wasn’t what Jim had trained to do at Harvard, at
Yale Medical School, or in his neurosurgery residency at Stanford, but
somewhere along the line he had developed an interest in computer networking …”[3] even
though this company is in the making, a general confidence that it will be successful
and life changing is prominent. Many of the employees no matter what position
have degrees from reputable institutions, and a sense of this “A-team” is
assembled. It is an interesting perspective we receive from inside Google
through Edwards’s eyes.
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