Google: day of the open door in the inner sanctum

Google officially opens its development centre in Zurich today. Zurich is Google's biggest research location outside of the United States, and the new centre is intended to function as a hub for its research and development plans in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Of the over 3,500 Google employees in this region, at least 800 work in research and development. The Zurich centre accommodates 300 of them, from 40 nations. Among other things, the Zurich workers develop anti-spam solutions for Google Mail and software for Google's internal applications infrastructure.

Exterior of the new Google Zurich office
Google Zurich interior 1

The other 500 developers work at twelve locations scattered all over the region. In Arhus (Denmark), for example, ten Googlers (as they call themselves) work on the design of virtual machines. The Haifa location develops Google Suggest, an extension of the search engine that makes suggestions for search terms. At the recently opened location in Munich, the work includes SMS services.

The new Google office lies in the Hürlimann area, the site of a former brewery in the vicinity of Zurich city centre. The building, covering 12,000 square metres, has been built for growth - providing space for up to 800 staff. These future users have been included in the planning. This has resulted in a very flexible layout that enables rapid relocations and team changes - Googlers move on twice a year, on average. Large open areas are meant to give employees an informal atmosphere where they can meet each other and a lot of little embellishments are provided in order to stimulate creativity.

Google Zurich interior 2
Google Zurich office detail 1
Google Zurich office detail 2

(trk)