Goodboogle to all that

Light reflections on seven years

I didn’t expect to cry after turning in my laptop, but it’s always the small things that get you. I’d received it just before the pandemic and it had given me nothing but faithful service over those two strange years, so shoving it in the return locker and shutting the door, knowing I’d never lay eyes on those scratches and stickers again, felt like an ignoble parting. Marie Kondo was correct in her intuition that it’s hard to let go of objects without telling them thank you first.

This past week was my last at Google after spending more than seven years there, working principally on driving directions and navigation. I didn’t leave in a rage, or in despair; it was a kind, happy workplace, and I want to write about it affectionately here.

My path to Big Tech was somewhat atypical. I’d worked for a consulting company, and an opera company, and taken a year off somewhere in there to take courses on English Literature. I’d been contacted by a recruiter once, but she’d turned me away after taking a look at my resume; apparently I was not quite the thing. It took a referral from a friend to get me in the door. The interviews had a reputation for being difficult and that friend warned me not to get my hopes up. So I studied like a fiend, doing all the problems in Cracking the Coding Interview, challenging myself to solve them with pen and paper since I wouldn’t have access to a syntax-checking IDE.

The interview was one of those all-day affairs that Google itself helped to pioneer, five solid hours of solving algorithms problems on a whiteboard with one hour for lunch. I still vividly remember every question I was asked, and I still wonder if I would pass them now. For years afterward, whenever I stepped inside the conference room where they were held I felt a wave of anxious nausea. But I passed.

I gave up a lot to go work for Google: friends, a relationship, and a community in Toronto. It was like tearing my own insides out, but the truth was that I’d been looking for a way to wrench myself away from my life. Naively, I believed that the prestige and promise of a job at Google was so powerful that no one would be able to blame or reproach me for taking it. Turned out they blamed and reproached me anyway, but that’s another matter.

My first year there was 2014. It wasn’t called Alphabet yet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin still ran the company and gave unscripted answers to employee questions, and the logo still had serifs. I could plausibly call that the “good old days” of the company, but even then people were talking about how it used to be better. I remember sitting in the orientation presentations, having been issued my propellor hat, and watching videos about how Google was helping subsistence farmers fix their crops. It struck me: these people really believe in the techno-utopia. Never before had I encountered so much earnestness in a workplace.

But, in a way, it was hard not to believe in it, at a place like that. I remember one tweak we made years ago in navigation that might have saved someone a minute here, thirty seconds there every now and then. But if you added up all those minutes and seconds across everyone who used navigation, they added a year of time every day. A year’s worth of driving, of aggravation and carbon emissions and accidents, saved every day! The numbers were staggering to think about. A feature that had two million users might be thought of as a flop! A novel that sold two million copies would be a cultural phenomenon. With numbers like that, you could start taking seriously the idea that we were making the world a better place.

One advantage of working on something so well-known was what I’ll call the “hi mom” effect: I could point to something my friends used and proudly say “I did that!” I like to think that a few of the things I built will be around for at least a few more years for me (and my mom) to point at.

The other side of that coin, though, was hearing all the gripes and theories about why Maps acted the way it did. For a while I put @GoogleMaps in my twitter bio, but quickly learned it was better not to mention it. Like anything both ubiquitous and opaque, there were a lot of sinister theories floating around about how the routing algorithm worked, claims that it was being underhandedly tweaked to nefarious ends (to all those theories I will simply say: lol no).

One thing that really did surprise me about Google — and I mean this exactly as earnestly as it sounds — was how nice people were, how little drama there seemed to be, and how willing people were to be helpful to someone (me) who often didn’t know what they were doing. I was used to workplaces where there were at least a few condescending jerks, guarders of fiefdoms, guilt-tripping manipulators, and an undercurrent of nasty gossip. To work in a group where, to the best of my knowledge, those elements were simply not present was a revelation. Revelatory too, was the willingness to slow things down and get them right, even if it meant settling for a later release date or a more disruptive refactor than planned.

I find leaving jobs very difficult — even if I’m going to something new and great, there can’t be any change without loss. It’s probably wise not to get emotionally invested in a job, but sometimes it’s nearly impossible not to. I’ve advised friends who have left jobs not to feel too guilty — you’ll be shocked how quickly they move on, I usually say — and while I don’t feel guilty, I do feel very melancholy. Like in the song, they’ll get along without me very well.