I'm an engineer at Google. Ask me anything

I'll try to answer all questions from the comments.

All the opinions expressed are here are my own and do not represent the views or opinions of my employer

When I hear about how Google provides so many in-house perks to  employees, I automatically assume that they're trying to get you to  spend roughly 100% of your time there. What's your take on this?

I surely can't guess what "they" are trying to do. But I can tell you one thing - Google employees are not dumb :)

Thinking about it, I haven't noticed any people consistently spending an unreasonable time in the office. Many people have families to tend to. Personally, I've worked late once or twice, but when that happened it was because I was excited with the project and wanted to get some results, not because of the perks.

Ultimately, you won't be happy if you don't maintain a good work life balance, and unhappy employees are unproductive employees!

What is the passcode to enter [a Google] datacenter? :)

No passcode will ever get you inside :) 

Google datacenters have many layers of security, including security guards, cameras, iris scanners, and even movie-style laser beams. This page (which includes the video you linked) will tell you a bit more.

How long have you been in crypto?

I'll assume you mean cryptography in general.

I'd say I've started getting interested in "crypto" when I was around 11 and I wanted to send secret messages to my friends in school. I learned about Caesar ciphers and how to crack them, and eventually Vigenere ciphers. Wikipedia and Google didn't exist at the time, and I had pay-per-hour dial-up internet, so it was harder to find information those days!

After some years, the internet evolved, and I started absorbing information like a junkie :) I learned about hashes, symmetric and asymmetric encryption, blowfish, block and stream ciphers... A lot of things, really. Crypto is a fascinating field of study with new developments every year. I still haven't got my head around homomorphic and quantum encryption.

Do you like working there? seems a very good place to work.

I do - otherwise I wouldn't be there! It's a fun and challenging environment, and people around you are always coming up with cool new ideas. It's, in fact, a problem - there's so many great ideas and so little time to work on all of them!

Are you working on steem for Google or personal reasons?

I'm certainly not "working" on steem! I'm here on my personal time. I've just read the whitepaper yesterday and found it a bit lacking in detail, so I thought I should get to know the community better. Hacking around the blockchain will certainly ensue :)

What is your opinion of tensorflow? google x? self-driving cars?

I'm just starting to play around with Tensorflow, and it's very cool. Although the low level api will probably not interest most people, TFLearn is making things a lot better.

Regarding Google X, I think it's great that Google is really investing into long term goals, as opposed to just being focused on short term thinking. There's some really great technology being developed - I'm always excited when a new announcement comes out.

I took a taxi once from the office, and the driver asked me: when am I going to be replaced by one of your self-driving cars? It's going to be a huge social challenge. Taxi and truck drivers will probably be out of business within a decade, and we collectively need to figure out what to do about it