So what is Googleyness? A term that was created to describe Googlers. Then what a typical googler looks like? So I searched it on Google and I found the picture below.

In order to get a better understanding of Googleyness, I recently contacted a couple of my friends who worked at Google. According to them, there is no single definition of Googleyness. For example, my Google engineer friend told me, what distinguishes Google from other tech giants is that, at work, everyone writes code very fast, and they are always willing to help each other. Whereas my Google UX designer friend told me that Googleyness is about understanding users, and being innovative to create products for billions of users.

Their answers got me more excited about Googleyness, so I did a quick analysis of Googleyness using Natural Language Processing. The top five distinctive words associated with Googleyness that I found after scraping first 50 snippets of Google’s search result on Googleyness include the Intellectual, Candid, Humility, Creative and Fun. Below I give my understanding of those top five words:

• Intellectual: Everyone must have the role-related knowledge, or ability to learn role-related knowledge quickly. More importantly, it is about the ability to figure things out by finding simple processes that help work through problems from multiple dimensions and perspectives.
• Candid: Miscommunication is usually one of the root causes of an inefficient team. You must be honest about your ideas, reasonings, and methods so that people can not only understand your projects but also know what actions and influences they can have on your projects. In addition, creative contribution needs candid discussions and inputs.
• Humility: You should realize that the more you learn from work (or life), the more you know you don’t know. So don’t let the title, years of experience, or major expertise block your eyes, you should be open to admit what you know and what you don’t know. And embrace comments, doubts, criticism.
• Creative: Sometimes people do not know what their need for a product until it comes out, for example, VR. As technology becomes more and more advanced, and the Google can better understand users, Googlers should create something that can not only help people live, but also enjoy their life.
• Fun: Working at Google is almost equal to working for billions of people in the world. It is a long road to achieve their ultimate goal. So it is important to have fun along the way!

Please let me know what you think about Googleyness.

Data: Google Spreadsheet

Code: GitHub