MICHAEL BERRY
A young Google Sydney computer programmer has returned to the University of Canterbury to encourage more students into the information technology game.
Eddy Mead, 24, grew up in Christchurch and studied electrical engineering at the university along with an elective course of computer science.
At the end of her studies she didn't know what she wanted to do and applied for everything she could, including an internship with Google Sydney.
To her excitement, she got it and was offered a fulltime job at the end of it as a computer programmer working on Google Docs, a team making documents and spreadsheet systems that can be worked on by multiple users simultaneously.
Late last year the Rangi Ruru Girls' School old girl spent three months working at Google New York and went to a conference at the web giant's home in Mountain View, California.
She was happy about her job and excited about the industry, she said.
"It's pretty fun, you get to work with a lot of really smart people, it's really engaging and you learn heaps on the job as well. We have pretty awesome perks, I'd have to say: massages, the food, and they're pretty flexible on what you want to work on – you get to choose your own projects."
The Sydney office had about 600 staff, about half are computer programmers, and the office seemed to be steadily hiring more, she said.
Mead and four colleagues visited the University of Canterbury yesterday and today to encourage students to look at a career in IT, an industry crying out for more workers.
The Google team held a coding challenge for about 50 university students at the Christchurch campus last night, followed by a chat today about what Google programmers do.
University computer science and software engineering department deputy head Tim Bell said Google was proactive about addressing the desperate skills shortage facing Western countries' IT sectors and presented to the Canterbury campus annually.
Google also sponsored workshops for high school teachers to raise the profile of the industry as a career choice earlier in students' lives, he said.
The number of people taking computer science at the university had dived 70 per cent since 2000, when the dotcom bubble burst, and it had stayed that way, he said.
About 100 people graduated from the Canterbury computer science department each year.
IT jobs were not the lonely, boring and unstable jobs people seemed to think, and the industry was suffering from that perception, he said.
"Young people don't think about where it [technology] came from – it's like Steve Jobs built it all – when in reality those people hire thousands of people to do all the clever stuff to make it work."
- © Fairfax NZ News
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.
No comments:
Post a Comment