“Working at the United Nations? I thought you said you worked at Google!”
Right - I have worked at Google. But daily it seemed to me as if I were working at the United Nations.
Google is a company with a vision for the whole world: “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” New products that are released are generally released in the world’s top 40 languages all at the same time. Those products that have been around longer are usually available in 100+ languages. And while there has generally been an economic divide between those who have access to the internet and those who do not, that divide has been shrinking through the ubiquitous presence of mobile devices, which one finds in both rich and poor households. And so Google thinks hard about how to make their services available to “the next billion users”.
But Google is not a white American company with international aspirations and reach. The people of Google are drawn from all over the world. For example, I’m part of an engineering team that serves Google’s advertising business around the world from our location in Venice, California. But our manager is originally from southern Europe. She has hired an ethnically diverse team of women and men who come from all over the world. Each brings not only a love for (and skill in) coding to our work but also their own ethnic background and personal flare to our ambiance. The people we work with make us rich, just by bringing themselves into our daily relationships.
I’ve had the chance to give unofficial “tours” of the office to friends, families and students of local universities. The essence of working at Google is simple: a bunch of smart people who love to work hard sitting in front what seem to be endless rows of computer screens. One group might be working on Chrome (the Google browser), another working on image search, still another on semantic classifiers that do their magic independent of a user’s input language - but those are things that aren’t apparent from a cursory glance. Instead what people see is: free food in the cafe, our own coffee bar and barista, micro-kitchens scattered around the campus, game rooms with musical instruments, ping-pong tables and electronic games, and on and on.
Where does cultural diversity come from? The Tower of Babel story in Genesis says that God thwarted the self aggrandizing efforts of people to build a tower that would reach into heaven by confusing their languages, resulting in the fragmentation of human society - which sounds like a bad thing. But the apostle Paul balances that theme as he speaks in Athens to those gathered at the Areopagus, a Greek center of philosophy and discussion:
“... and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us;” (Acts 17:26-27)
The original intent of cultural diversity was to free us from our obsession with what we can accomplish in our own power and underscore our need to know the One who had the power to create not only nature but also human language and culture with such diversity. Cultural diversity is a good thing.
So I’ll miss not just working at Google - I’ll miss the people, the variety and diversity: the attractive accents of those for whom English is not their first language; having nearby native German speakers with whom I can share the occasional reminder of my own second language; hearing stories of what is was like to grow up in China or India. I’ll miss the men and women, each contributing their own unique experiences, sense of humor and sensibilities.
I’ll miss working at the United Nations.
