Google is officially celebrating its 20th bithday this Thursday. But though its namesake search engine launched in 1998, the then-tiny startup didn’t get around to hiring any interns until 1999. When it did, Jen Fitzpatrick was one of them. Then she became one of the company’s first women engineers. Over the subsequent years, she cofounded Google’s user experience team and worked on search, advertising, Google News, and other products. In 2014, she took on overarching responsibility for Google Maps and Local as Google’s VP for geo. I recently spoke with Fitzpatrick about why she joined Google, why she stayed, and the challenges and opportunities of her current job. This interview has been edited for publication. “My parents thought I was crazy” Fast Company: Let’s start at the beginning. How did you come to work at Google? Jen Fitzpatrick: I was a student in the Computer Science department at Stanford at the time, and first heard of Google as a product before it had turned into Google, when it was still a research product. And I quite literally just fell in love with the product. I was a student; information was a big deal to me. It very quickly turned into… Read full this story
- 'My Parkdale is gone': how gentrification reached the one place that seemed immune
- The Storming of Area 51: A Covert Journey to the Heart of America’s Worst-Kept Secret
- Is Uber Evil, or Just Doomed?
- Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
How I went from Google intern to the head of Google Maps have 249 words, post on www.fastcompany.com at September 26, 2018. This is cached page on Auto Breaking News. If you want remove this page, please contact us.