For former Chatham man Shawn Wallace, a career at Google is about making people’s lives better.
Throughout his five-and-a-half years at the company’s offices in Kitchener-Waterloo, Wallace has worked on several projects.
He is currently working on what is called Kubernetes, which he admits most people probably haven’t heard of.
“It’s pretty technical, but basically what they did is they took everything that Google has learned over the last 20 years from a technology perspective and they made a product out of it, so that other companies can benefit from all the things that we’ve learned,” he said.
Wallace, who graduated from Ursuline College Chatham in 1991, said in this case the project makes things easier for people who work for companies with big web and application deployments.
“Most of the gratification that I get doesn’t really have anything to do with the specific project. It’s more about being able to do things that make people’s lives better,” said the company’s technical lead for Google Cloud in Canada.
“I worked on our WiFi projects, so you can have a WiFi router in your home made by Google. It’s does lot for you. It makes your life easier, has a lot of security built in.”
Wallace also acts as the engineering liaison for internships at his office and helps recruit people for internships.
“One of my particular passions is trying to fix diversity in tech,” he said. “Historically, tech companies don’t have a great track record of hiring women and visible minorities and we’re trying to fix that.”
Although he can’t disclose specific numbers, he said the company has “actually made pretty significant improvements” in this area.
Besides the obvious skills, such as computer science, Wallace said he looks for people who are more creative and great communicators.
“Everything we do is on teams and to be effective on a team, you have to be able to communicate with people,” he said.
“Mostly, we look for people who are passionate, not necessarily about computers, but people who have demonstrated a passion for something. Maybe you’re a concert pianist or something. You’ve demonstrated that drive and commitment to something.”
Wallace said he has been interested in technology since his family bought their first computer when he was five years old. He said he always wanted his career to involve computers since he started high school, even though they were scarcely used in the curriculum at the time.
“High school was one course that was using computers, but it was pretty basic,” he said. “For the most part, at that time, everyone who used computers were self-taught. You sort of learned what you could from tinkering on your own.”
Wallace went to McMaster University, but dropped out after two years because he was “bored” and started a few businesses, which were mostly internet-based.
Eventually he decided to complete his bachelor’s degree at Acadia University and then his masters at the University of Waterloo.
During the burst of the dot-com bubble, he said he decided to get a “real job” to support his young children and started working at McAfee, then Blackberry.
Google, which is marking its 20th anniversary this year, then offered him a job five and half years ago.
Wallace said he remembers when Google first came out during a period when there were several competitors working to perfect the search engine.
“In the beginning, Google wasn’t necessarily considered to be an extraordinary thing yet,” he said. “Obviously they had a lot of foresight to the growth of the internet, but in the early days, the internet just wasn’t that big.”
The internet has helped make communications easier across the world, which is a good thing for a company like Google, said Wallace.
However, recent developments have exposed parts of the internet “that I think a lot of us would prefer didn’t exist,” he said.
“I think the next 10 years are going to be incredibly interesting when it comes to things like privacy and people’s rights on the internet, avenues that have never really had to have been explored before are now coming to the forefront.”
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