"In the hopes of shrinking this education gap, Google sent Bisciglia back to his alma mater, the University of Washington, where he taught a course on "working with big data." And Hadoop was the teaching model.

Google ended up hiring about half the students who took the class. And after the company open-sourced the curriculum, the same course was picked up by several other universities, including MIT and Berkeley. "In the past, it took three to six months to get hires up to speed with how to work with [Google] technology," Bisciglia says. "But if schools are teaching this as part of the standard undergraduate curriculum, Google saved that three to six months - multiplied by thousands of engineers.""