The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [66]
My reverie was broken by the appearance of Sergey, a compact man perhaps a few years younger than Larry. He suggested that I go with them to their TGIF assembly, a tradition that they had maintained since the beginning of the company, when all of Google’s employees got together over beer and food and discussed whatever they had on their minds. As we entered a large hall, throngs of young people were already seated, some drinking and laughing, others still typing into PDAs or laptops, a buzz of excitement in the air. A group of fifty or so seemed more attentive than the rest, and David explained that these were the new hires, fresh from graduate school; today was their induction into the Google team. One by one, the new employees were introduced, their faces flashing on a big screen alongside information about their degrees, hobbies, and interests. At least half of the group looked Asian; a large percentage of the whites had Eastern European names. As far as I could tell, not one was black or Latino. Later, walking back to my car, I mentioned this to David and he nodded.
“We know it’s a problem,” he said, and mentioned efforts Google was making to provide scholarships to expand the pool of minority and female math and science students. In the meantime, Google needed to stay competitive, which meant hiring the top graduates of the top math, engineering, and computer science programs in the country—MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley. You could count on two hands, David told me, the number of black and Latino kids in those programs.
In fact, according to David, just finding American-born engineers, whatever their race, was getting harder—which was why every company in Silicon Valley had come to rely heavily on foreign students. Lately, high-tech employers had a new set of worries: Since 9/11 a lot of foreign students were having second thoughts about studying in the States due to the difficulties in obtaining visas. Top-notch engineers or software designers didn’t need to come to Silicon Valley anymore to find work or get financing for a start-up. High-tech firms were setting up operations in India and China at a rapid pace, and venture funds were now global; they would just as readily invest in Mumbai or Shanghai as in California. And over the long term, David explained, that could spell trouble for the U.S. economy.
“We’ll be able to keep attracting talent,” he said, “because we’re so well branded. But for the start-ups, some of the less established companies, the next Google, who knows? I just hope somebody in Washington understands how competitive things have become. Our dominance isn’t inevitable.”
AROUND THE SAME time that I visited Google, I took another trip that made me think about what was happening with the economy. This one was by car, not jet, along miles of empty highway, to a town called Galesburg, forty-five minutes or so from the Iowa border in western Illinois.
Founded in 1836, Galesburg had begun as a college town when a group of Presbyterian and Congregational ministers in New York decided to bring their blend of social reform and practical education to the Western frontier. The resulting school, Knox College, became a hotbed of abolitionist activity before the Civil War—a branch of the Underground Railroad had run through Galesburg, and Hiram Revels, the nation’s first black U.S. senator, attended the college’s prep school before moving back