Yesterday marked my 14\u00a0year Googleversary. I joined Google full time on\nOctober\u00a01, 2007 as a new-grad straight from university. While for the\nGoogleversary stats all that counts is full time employment, I was with Google\nway earlier. First as an intern between my second and third year at university\nstarting on February\u00a01, 2005, and then continuously throughout the rest of\nmy studies as a temporary worker and via other internship contracts. The way\nthis actual employment age shows is through the employee ID. Mine is in the\n9,000 range, but people who joined about the time when I joined full-time have a\n50,000 range ID. At the time of writing, 98.08871% of full time employees and\nextended workers have been at Alphabet for less time than me. During these\n14\u00a0years, I've had 15\u00a0managers, some of them multiple times. I have\n2.85-ified my salary (sounds impressive maybe, but I simply started very low),\nand have gone through three promotions. That's one promotion less than I think I\ncould have had, but instead I enjoyed a different perk: I did my PhD on company\ntime.<\/p>\n
While I wanted to do a PhD after three years on the job, I wasn't initially\nplanning on doing it on company time. Quite the opposite. From February 1, 2010,\nI had reduced my work load to 60% to work on my PhD in the remaining 40%. After\nhaving this arrangement for two or three months, one evening my at the time\nmanager's manager called to make me an offer I couldn't resist: to come back\nfull time and work on I-SEARCH<\/a> (A\nunIfied framework for multimodal content SEARCH), a three-year European project\nfunded under FP7-ICT<\/a>. This very\nmanager left the company a couple of months later and his successor didn't see\nthe same value in EU projects than the manager who left, and while they let me\ncontinue my (multi-year) work, my previous (Strongly) Exceeds ratings that I\nreceived for several quarters went down to regular Meets Expectations. Lesson\nlearned in hindsight:<\/p>\n Never make your personal work arrangement depend on the goodwill of a sole\nmanager, as powerful as this manager may appear.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n During this time, I cranked out a number of\npublications<\/a>\n(some of them fine, some of them mediocre), but above all made great friends and\ntraveled the world. You can see me co-present the result of the project, a\nmultimodal search engine, and to my surprise the\nuser interface of I-SEARCH<\/a> is\nstill up.<\/p>\n\n