Last week I had lunch with Chris Millikin, Operations Manager for Google
in Phoenix. Chris is in charge of putting together the engineering team
for the Google office. He is very anxious to help grow the Linux/FS/OSS
community in the valley which obviously includes LUGs and other FS/OSS
groups. He is concerned about finding the right people to hire, now and
in the future. Growing the local eco-system to produce the right people
is one of his big concerns, including education.
The Phoenix office will be charged with creating programs/applications
for internal company use. This means they need applications developers
for accounting, resource management, business processes, that kind of
stuff. All servers and all desktops are primarily Linux, by far. This
makes the right kind of developers hard to find.
They want to find people to hire and help create a culture or
environment that continues to produce people they want to hire. He
wants to work with local schools (colleges and ASU, etc.) to promote
Linux learning. That means tapping talent now and supporting the
Linux/FS/OSS/Unix community in Phoenix. That means helping and working
with PLUG.
He wants the relationship to grow organically. Google participation
with PLUG will be as sponsor or presenter or swag provider first with
any recruiting as a side effect of that. This allayed my fears of a
"PLUG take over by Google."
He cannot attend any meetings in December due to previous commitments
but has put January East Side on his calendar. He would like to take
about 5 minutes at that meeting to introduce himself and Google and ask
for job seekers to contact Google.
So, a new resource for the group. I don't want PLUG to become a Google
recruiting arm and neither does Google. So we still need to grow our
group, with Google as a part of that. Google wants to grow itself and
the community of which PLUG is a part. Seems like a good mix to me.
Alan
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