Last week, I was invited to an Open House for financial services technical professionals at Google in New York City. I wasn’t sure how I ended up on the invitation list. I thought that it perhaps had something to do with me blogging conferences in the financial services, technology and/or advertising and marketing areas. So, I grabbed my PC, cellphone and other blogging tools and headed off to Google.

When I arrived, I ran into Marc. I had worked with Marc at a job on Wall Street, and some I was confused for a moment, since he was wearing a badge identifying himself as a Google employee. Part of the confusion was because I had worked with another guy named Mark on Wall Street who had gone over to Microsoft. I mumbled a few confused, what are you doing here, as I tried to make sense out of everything.

It turns out that Marc was the person who had put my name on the list, and the open house was not about blogging, but was about getting the message out that Google is doing very well, with over five hundred engineers in New York City and an appetite for more, especially any of those that had spent time on Wall Street.

So, I drank some white wine, ate some hors d’oeuvres and schmoozed. There were quite a few old friends from Wall Street who were there. A few had moved over to Google and others were being courted.

I took a tour of their office. The building is an old transit authority building, with elevators that could carry trucks. The building takes up a whole block and has the largest footprint of any building in New York, and only one building has more floor space than the building. I took a few pictures with my cell phone of images that seemed to capture the spirit of Google engineering in New York. There were scooters to get around the building quickly. There were food kiosks everywhere. There were collections of antique computers, a rec room and a panoramic picture of New York with Godzilla added in.

Back in the presentation room, I chatted with various Google employees and the environment. I spoke with a tech support manager about the difficulties of doing tech support in a place like Google. I asked about IPv6 and he talked about religious factions that were pushing hard for it and others that were ambivalent.

I talked about the twenty percent time. This is the time given engineers to work on something they are passionate about. I asked about how such projects were managed, and asked about what emerges out of these projects. This led to one of my favorite topics about how in many ways, social networks are nothing but higher level neural networks, and it would be very interesting to see people work on quantifying connections in social networks within specific contexts and then applying back propagation to the social networks to adjust the network. I was asked what such social networks would ‘solve’, and I suggested it had something to do with discovering what is ‘important’ to a society.

I talked briefly about whether there had been much discussion about a Google executive becoming our nation’s first CTO and was told there had not been much water cooler discussions on this.

When it was time for the presentations to begin, we all sat down. Since I had gone, prepared to wear my bloggers hat, I took out my laptop and took notes. It felt strange to be the only person with a laptop fired up taking notes. I connected through Google’s guest WiFi and managed to Twitter a little at the same time.

Ben Fried, the Chief Information Officer for Google was introduced. He had worked for thirteen years at Morgan Stanley before coming over to Google. He spoke about going to hear Salman Rushdie speak, only to find himself sitting near Brian W. Kernighan in the audience. His message was clear. Google is a fun place with lots of interesting people.

“We are here to tell you that there is life after Wall Street,” he proclaimed. “We have tons of really hard problems and we hire super smart people to solve those problems.” He spoke about his days at Morgan Stanley saying, “We said technology is the business on Wall Street. It really is here...Engineering is the core of what the company does.” He went on to note that “Finance works here to support engineering” and tied things together with “We are hoping to take advantage of these hard times…. I have many many openings…”

He talked about his process of coming on board at Google took him eight months but that he hoped others would make a decision sooner because he needs “a lot of great people pretty damn quick”.

He was followed by Google Engineering Director, Alan Warren. Dr. Warren said that his talk was about Google Finance, but really he wanted to talk about how projects were done at Google.

When he started working on Google Finance, he was told “Build it so the users love it, and we’ll figure out how to make money off of it later.” He also noted that “One of the things we try to do is drive change”. He spoke about gathering up work from people doing projects on 20% time.

In terms of ongoing project he told everyone that in ads they have projects that will keep them busy for the next three years, at least.

Dr. Warren was followed by another Google Engineering Director , Fran Ryan, who joined Google eight months ago, coming over as part of DoubleClick. Mr. Ryan focused on issues of scale, massive numbers of events, of ad revenue and logs files to be processed. To do this, he mentioned some interesting technology, the Google File System, MapReduce and Big Table. Each of these papers are ones that I look forward to spending time reading, if I ever get some free time.

During the Q&A time, they also mentioned Sawmill which also sounds very interesting. There were plenty of other interesting comments, but at this point, it might get a bit long winded and geeky for most of my readers.

So, while this was not a typical blogging outing, and how many blogging outings ever really are typical, it was fascinating. The message was clear, for bright technologists there is life after Wall Street, and Google would like the brightest of them to consider Google as part of that life.