May 12, 2003

With the technology start-up boom over, the term Silicon Alley is fading into history, leaving behind a New York Internet industry that offers little excitement. But that has not stopped Google Inc., the Internet's post-boom darling, from planning to hire a team of about 100 software engineers for its Manhattan office.

"We came to the realization that not all the good programmers in the world lived in Silicon Valley," said Craig Nevill-Manning, a senior research scientist at Google who is relocating to New York. "And not all the good programmers in the world wanted to live in Silicon Valley."

The hiring spree by Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., offers little hope for New York's army of underemployed Web-design jockeys and e-commerce experts. Instead, Google is seeking the kind of advanced programmers who have been lurking around Wall Street's financial firms and New Jersey's corporate research labs for years. Mr. Nevill-Manning said, for example, that Google had already hired some programmers from Bell Labs.

Along with options to buy shares in Google, which is still private, the company is offering its engineer job candidates, as a break from their usual arcane research, the chance to work on practical projects like making improvements to its popular search engine. "They want to work on something their grandmother can appreciate," said Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology and the first employee hired by its founders.

The New York team will collaborate with the roughly 400 programmers at Google's headquarters and will also be free to develop their own projects, he said.

Until now, Google's colorful New York office near Times Square has housed an advertising sales group. Employees there have to do without the home office's cafeteria, where meals are prepared by the former chef for the Grateful Dead.

But Mr. Silverstein, who perched on an inflatable blue ball during an interview in the New York office, said the company was trying to make sure the staff there did not feel like second-class citizens. For example, employees on both coasts plan to take field trips to see the film "The Matrix: Reloaded" this week. And "we have free M&M;'s here as well," he said.

Source: New York Times

        

We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. The keywords you think are the best may be totally different than the ones recommended by WordTracker. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.