Google Inside

I have known Bharat Mediratta for a number of years now. We finally had the change to meet late last year at Google’s corporate office in NYC.

But enough about Bharat, he will explain more about himself in the interview.

Note: this interview was conducted via e-mail as he’s based out of Mountain View, CA and I am based out of NYC. Additionally, this interview was conducted to help provide insight to a Google employee’s life, not to dig into his exact job responsibilities with Google.

Interview Transcript

What is your name?

Bharat Mediratta. My friends call me “Bart”.

How long have you been with Google?

I’ve been with Google since June of 2004, so it’s going on 4 years now.

Why Google?

Google is the seventh tech company I’ve worked for in Silicon Valley. My past experience at other companies has given me a deep understanding about what types of work environments I enjoy, and
where I can be productive and useful. Google combines most of the best qualities of all the companies where I’ve worked. It’s got the resources of a large company but comes with the sense of empowerment that you normally can only achieve in a much smaller workplace. And Google has an amazing concentration of really smart people. This opportunity to work with and learn from so many smart people is difficult to find and something I value highly.

What do you do for Google?

I am a team lead for a software system called the Google Web Server. This is the user facing part for most Google searches and is the system triggered every time you do a Web search on Google. My main job is to make sure that GWS is moving in the right direction to support Google’s users and overall strategy for the future of web search. I direct a team of really clever and creative engineers who do all the heavy lifting, but I try to keep my hand in and write a little code every day.

What is one of the greatest improvements you’ve seen on the Google Web
Server since you’ve been at Google?

In May of 2005 we launched two really great features into GWS. The first one is Universal Search. It was a tremendous effort by many separate teams to convert the user’s search query into results that extend beyond just simple web pages. Adding in results from news, books, video and other sources required significant infrastructural improvements. However, one of the parts that I’m the most proud of is the way that we integrated these results into GWS to provide a seamless and meaningful set of results from different areas. To see what this looks like, try searching for “manhattan restaurants” or “obama” and look at the quality and diversity of the results.

The second big thing we launched in May 2005 is the Google Navigation Bar. This is a series of links across most popular Google properties simplifies navigation between properties. Switching from Web Search to GMail is now a single click which helps draw all of our properties together and make them more accessible to our users. This may seem like a small change.. after all, how hard could it be to add a little HTML to the top of every page, in 40 languages and domains, on 17 different properties? But with most things that Google does, we put a lot of work into creating a solution that helps our users without getting in their way. The simpler and easier it looks, the happier our users are.

What is a normal work day like for you?

I’m married, I have two children and a social life. On the side, I work on a fairly popular open source project called Gallery. As a result, it’s necessary for me to maintain a balanced life. This means that I limit the amount of time that I spend at work, and I choose very carefully what I do with that time.

Right now I spend about half of my time in meetings, since providing strategic direction to my team is much more valuable than any coding contribution that I could personally make. I spend probably another hour a day taking care of longer term issues, which are generally handled via email. This generally involves participating in design discussions with other teams, seeking out and resolving conflicts, and being available to consult on issues as they arise.

The rest of the day I spend taking care of short term work that I’m trying to push forward. Usually for me this means that I pick up a few team related development tasks that are not on the critical path and try to get one or two of them accomplished a day. I find that I’m motivated by a variety of engineering efforts, so typically I pick up whatever nobody else wants to do and see if I can push it forward. It’s very important to me that I continue to be involved in the technical aspects of the work that my team is doing so that I can maintain a deep understanding of my project. To this end, it’s common for me work on a random bug so that it’ll take me into new and interesting areas of the codebase.

What kind of fun things does Google’s work policies allow you to do?
On the job? Off the job?

Google cultivates an atmosphere of creativity wherever possible. This means that it’s very common to see email conversations that start with somebody saying “Wouldn’t it be cool if web search did X” and get a reply saying “Hey, I think so too and I’ve already started working on making it happen”. Engineers who are interested will glom onto ideas and work on them for a while. Many of these ideas fail, but that’s to be expected. The process of trying things out deepens our experience and helps us to identify the good ideas. Some ideas that have come out of these side projects include very popular properties like Google News and Gmail and great features like Google Suggest.

Off the job, Google offers a great environment for a wide variety of creative outlets. Engineers on my team regularly go rock climbing, camping, skiing. Our team went to a San Jose Sharks game recently. It’s a fun and social environment where you not only get to interact with your peers in a professional context but you can easily connect with folks that you enjoy spending time with socially and there are always plenty of opportunities to socialize. This is the advantage of having a small company feeling with a big population to draw from.

There’s a regular Google ultimate game where I try to play twice a week. It’s held right next to the Google campus so it’s very convenient for me to get to, and It’s not limited to just Googlers so we get a pretty good crowd to show up and play. This is my favorite form of exercise so I deeply appreciate being in a work environment where it’s convenient for me to go and play with my friends on a regular basis.

Do you see any huge new revolution in the Google Web Server coming up
in the near future?

We’re always focused on improving the quality of web search and we always have great new things coming down the pipe. I don’t want to ruin any surprises though.

Do you have a favorite project you like to work on at Google? If yes,
which one?

There are many projects at Google, and I’ve been involved in quite a few but my main involvement has been almost entirely with GWS. I’ve been working on GWS for going on 4 years now and I’m happy to say that I still thoroughly enjoy this project and hope that I get the opportunity to keep working on it for the foreseeable future. So you could say that I’m already working on my favorite project. That’s not to say that there aren’t other great projects at Google. One of my other favorites is the Open Source Program Office is a great example of this. They are kicking off the 4th year of the Summer of Code where they pay students to work on open source to better the community.

What has been your most memorable moment at Google so far?

I’ve had a lot of memorable moments so it’s hard to choose. If I had to pick one, though I’d say it was the very first time I used the new Google Maps. This must have been in January of 2005, when somebody sent out an email internally saying that we were getting ready to launch our new maps system. I didn’t read the email and I clicked through to the demo and typed in some queries and thought “big deal, it’s another map system.” Then I realized that there were no arrow buttons to move the map around and I quickly realized that I could drag the map around. My jaw dropped when I saw this and instantly realized that it was going to completely revolutionize web based mapping systems. It was almost physically painful to have to keep news of this product quiet until the official launch happened almost 2 months later. And when it launched I took great pleasure in sending emails to my family and showing them what they could do with it.

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