Woman at Work. Quotes from Google’s Female Top Gun, Marissa Mayer.
Marissa Mayer is Google’s first female engineer. And presently as a senior executive, she is considered as one of the most powerful women in the Silicon Valley. Her work in Google is vital in its foray into location based services. As a hands-on manager of her team, she spends 90 to 95 percent of her time in the office while the other 5 to 10 percent being the public face for Google.
Here are some quotes from Marissa Mayer:
On choosing to work for Google
“I wanted to work at Google because the smartest people were there. And I wanted to work at Google because I felt utterly unprepared to work at a search engine.”
On women working in technology and computer science fields
“I think one of the things that really inspires people to go into an industry or practice in a field is being able to understand its impact. One of the things that studies have shown is that women are concerned with the impact of their work more than men are. They want to know that what they’re doing matters to someone. And given that, I think that now that technology, and especially internet technology and mobile technology, touches everyone’s lives on a daily basis, I really hope that that will inspire more women to enter the field of technology and make that kind of impact.”
Her advice to young women who might view her as a role model
“I have five pieces of advice I can rattle off of the top of my head:
1. Work with the smartest people you can find.
2. Do something you’re not ready to do.
3. Find a place where you’re comfortable. When you’re comfortable, that’s when you overcome any shyness and inhibitions and can really speak your mind.
4. Work for someone who invests in you. You want someone who would trust you with responsibility, who sends you for more training or seminars, and tries to really help build you for what you’re going to do next, whether for that company or somewhere else.
5. Find your rhythm. I actually have a very different philosophy about burnout than a lot of people do. I don’t think that burnout comes from not getting enough sleep or not eating enough square meals. I think that burnout comes from resentment. It’s when people say, ‘I worked so hard this week, and I couldn’t even get this thing I wanted. I wanted to go to a movie. I wanted to go on vacation. I wanted to be there for my kids.’ Sometimes people say, ‘I worked so hard this week, I didn’t even get eight hours of sleep.’ For some people, what really matters to them is sleep. For other people, it’s something else that really matters to them. It is possible to work ‘too hard,’ but you need to figure out what things it really is you need to stay fueled up, to stay energized, to not get resentful.”
On being a woman at work
“I’m not a woman at Google, I’m a geek at Google. If you can find something that you’re really passionate about, whether you’re a man or a woman comes a lot less into play. Passion is a gender-neutralizing force.”
Thanks for reading this coffee break tidbit on work 
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