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In an article for the Financial Times, Maija Palmer said it all, writing, “Google is planning to expand its staff by a third, with most of the new hirings in Europe . . .”  But to add my editorial voice to the mix: holy crap.

Europe Braces For Google Buildup

Perhaps I’ve been thinking too much about Ken Burns’s “The War,” yet this news called up images of paratroopers and landing parties dressed in Google t-shirts.  And that’s just in my mind.  Europeans, who may or may not be thrilled with America at the moment, could be even more unnerved.

“We are not seen correctly in Europe,” admitted Nelson Mattos, Google’s European head of engineering in Europe, in an interview with Palmer.  “My impression is that Google is seen as a big US company that is here to make money.  There is a lack of understanding of how we work.  People don’t understand the business model, the new computing environment and the employees in shorts.”

The people who are hired by Google (engineers, by all accounts) will probably be able to get over those concerns, but, as you can tell from Mattos’s comments, the search giant would prefer to generate warm fuzzies.