Google goes to school

What to do when you're one of the best in your field and have all the money you could ever spend? You mentor — which is exactly what 26-year-old Christophe Bisciglia, Google programmer extraordinaire, is doing - by teaching a class in Google 101, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Bisciglia has designed a class at the University of Washington that teaches students to program like Google does. It has developed its own programs to manage the Internet's massive data stream to become to leading search engine. Google has redefined the search engine and needs programmers familiar with Google's innovations.

"When I interview college students, they have a grasp of computing, but it's fundamentally different," Bisciglia said.

When Google hires programmers, they spend months in retraining. Bisciglia hopes his class will help mitigate this problem.

UW computer science professor Ed Lazowska at the University of Washington said that students are learning to create a computing system that organizes and makes sense of massive amounts of information.

"It's incredible," Lazowska said. "It helps us keep our curriculum current in ways we couldn't do ourselves."

Of course there is no guarantee that students who take the course will work for Google. They're just as likely to work for Microsoft, given that the class is being given a stone's throw from Redmond. That's a risk Google is willing to take.

"It's not about our competitors," Google program manager Chris DiBona said. Companies have to think about pushing technology forward, he said.