Yesterday marked my 14 year Googleversary. I joined Google full time on
October 1, 2007 as a new-grad straight from university. While for the
Googleversary stats all that counts is full time employment, I was with Google
way earlier. First as an intern between my second and third year at university
starting on February 1, 2005, and then continuously throughout the rest of
my studies as a temporary worker and via other internship contracts. The way
this actual employment age shows is through the employee ID. Mine is in the
9,000 range, but people who joined about the time when I joined full-time have a
50,000 range ID. At the time of writing, 98.08871% of full time employees and
extended workers have been at Alphabet for less time than me. During these
14 years, I've had 15 managers, some of them multiple times. I have
2.85-ified my salary (sounds impressive maybe, but I simply started very low),
and have gone through three promotions. That's one promotion less than I think I
could have had, but instead I enjoyed a different perk: I did my PhD on company
time.
The PhD time (2010–2014) 🔗
While I wanted to do a PhD after three years on the job, I wasn't initially
planning on doing it on company time. Quite the opposite. From February 1, 2010,
I had reduced my work load to 60% to work on my PhD in the remaining 40%. After
having this arrangement for two or three months, one evening my at the time
manager's manager called to make me an offer I couldn't resist: to come back
full time and work on I-SEARCH (A
unIfied framework for multimodal content SEARCH), a three-year European project
funded under FP7-ICT. This very
manager left the company a couple of months later and his successor didn't see
the same value in EU projects than the manager who left, and while they let me
continue my (multi-year) work, my previous (Strongly) Exceeds ratings that I
received for several quarters went down to regular Meets Expectations. Lesson
learned in hindsight:
Never make your personal work arrangement depend on the goodwill of a sole
manager, as powerful as this manager may appear.
During this time, I cranked out a number of
publications
(some of them fine, some of them mediocre), but above all made great friends and
traveled the world. You can see me co-present the result of the project, a
multimodal search engine, and to my surprise the
user interface of I-SEARCH is
still up.
My internship time (2005–2006) 🔗
My internship project—that sort of just evolved—was the Google AdWords PHP
client library APIlity. At the time,
the AdWords API (a very enterprise SOAP API) was brand new, and I happened to be
the intern who was able to make it work. I had some experience with REST APIs
from my
Master's thesis,
you can enjoy my first ever tech talk on the topic below.
The first few years (2007–2010) 🔗
During my first few full time years, I continued my work on the AdWords API as a
Customer Solutions Engineer, but my heart always was with developer advocacy. I
took on any opportunity I could get to hack my job and work with developers. One
of my best memories is the 2008 series of Google Developer Days, where we toured
all of Europe. Embedded below a presentation of mine on the Google Web Toolkit.
An advantage of the early years was that Google was a lot smaller and job roles
that were distinct in the US were still not present in Europe, so others like me
who were just somewhat technical enough needed to jump in and represent locally.
After the PhD (2014–2018) 🔗
After finishing my PhD, I was (very naively so) disappointed that no one at the
company cared. No pay raise. No job offer. I actually had to beg to go back to
my previous Customer Solutions Engineer job that was the reason why I had
started the PhD in the first place. While I tried for a while to get hired
elsewhere and also switch jobs internally, nothing really worked out for various
reasons (mostly location constraints and failed interviews). Another lesson
learned:
Don't assume anyone in the company will care for your self-arranged further
education. Having a PhD or not makes a difference as a new hire, but not
later.
Getting into Chrome Developer Relations (2018) 🔗
Location always was a big factor in what roles you could get at Google. I made
no secret of my interest in developer advocacy, but not being in one of the hub
engineering offices meant this door was closed. I lobbied
Paul Kinlan long enough until he eventually let me
apply for a role on the Chrome Developer Relations team. The time between the
interviews and the (thankfully positive) decision of the hiring committee was
one of the most nerve-wrecking in my life. Long story short, it took me more
than ten years to get the job I actually wanted. Not a real lesson, but more a
reflection:
Taking an educated risk and doing what you really want while doing just
enough to not get fired for doing too little of the things you actually get
paid for is a strategy that sometimes works out. I wouldn't recommend it,
unless you really, really want something.
Reflections on the present (2018–present) 🔗
Now I'm in Chrome Developer Relations since May 28, 2018 and it's an
honestly great team to be on. My work is about evolving the Web and making
things possible on the platform that were unthinkable before. I
spoke twice at Google I/O,
was part of Chrome Dev Summits, and presented at more international conferences
than I can remember.
Ironically the corona crisis demonstrated that location didn't matter that much
after all, at least for a distributed team like Chrome Developer Relations. Had
corona come a couple of years ago, maybe they would have let me apply for the
Developer Relations team way earlier, who knows. Since I started working for
Google, I always lived a ten minute walk away from the office, but despite this
short distance and even if I enjoy working in an office, I've now successfully
applied for my position to be permanently remote. Mostly to secure the right.
What's next? 🔗
Is it time for the next gig? Maybe. It's very unusual for people in IT to stay
on the same job for as long as I did. Will I see 15 years at Google? Who
knows. Very probably so. For now, I'm definitely still having
fun, at least most of the days. Have I become more cynical? Definitely. Do I
panic when yet another re-org is being announced? Nope. One thing is certain,
though: my heart still beats for the Web. Reach out if you have questions on
anything that I wrote or if you want to discuss ideas. My
DMs are open and my email is right on my
About page.
This post appeared first on https://blog.tomayac.com/2021/10/02/14-years-at-google/.
