Please don't go

As most of you know by now, I have recently started a new job and left Google after 7 years.
The question that I get from a lot of people is: Why?
Google is generally regarded as a very desirable company to work for and people don’t understand why I would give up a senior job at a company like that.

Well, like most of these things, it’s complicated. That is why I wanted to write this so that you have the whole picture. There have been several factors that have influenced this decision, and to make sure that it is clear to everyone, I’ll explain all of them. Let’s get started. 

The seven year itch

The term seven year itch is normally used for married couples who have gotten bored of each other and therefore decide to end the marriage. Apparently, this happens disproportionately often around the 7 year mark.
I personally think that you can apply this theory to the workplace too. I have no personal frame of reference, or any official statistics to back me up, because I never worked anywhere for so long, but I left Google after exactly 7 years and 2 months. The previous record holder was Hertz Car Rental, where I worked for 5 years and 7 months, but they were surpassed by Google some time around Christmas 2020. 

(Hertz, by that time, had, unbeknownst to me, gone bankrupt, mainly as a result of the Covid pandemic, but that’s another story).

The thing is, I had always enjoyed working at Google, but somehow, doubts started to slip in at the end of 2021. I had applied for a promotion, but the job went to someone else. This turned out to be an advantage a few months down the line, but we’ll get to that. I will immediately admit that the guy they hired was better qualified for the job than me, and I’m no sore loser, so that was not the trigger, really. It was more the feeling of “What now?”. I had been working in the same team for about 6 years by then, and if I wasn’t going to get a job like the one I applied for, then where did that leave me within Google? This set in motion a train of thought that, ultimately, led to my decision to leave. There were also some influences out of my control that helped the decision making process a bit easier, so I will explain what happened next in the sections below. 

Paranoid Android

In November of 2018, our department was called into a meeting room for an announcement. We were informed that our business unit was going to expand significantly and, because of the capacity constraints on Google’s secondary campus, on the edge of Dublin city centre, they were going to move our entire department into a temporary rented office. This caused a lot of noise at first, but once the crowd calmed down and we were given a presentation about the building and its facilities, I started to see the upside of the move. You see, the building was a 5 minute walk from my favorite bar so I was on board. 

We had some teething problems at first, mainly to do with lighting and air conditioning, but we eventually settled in nicely and I started to really like the building.
We ended up staying there until late February 2020, and returned to our original building 3 weeks before COVID sent us all home.
A few months before we moved back though, Google had launched a new data protection policy called Clean Room Policy. It wasn’t entirely workable in the temporary building because of the lay out and the space, but once we got back to our campus building, the full extent of it started to dawn on us. 

It was as draconian as it was paranoid and ridiculous.

First have a look at this chart I drew, and I will explain it to you.

The first thing that they introduced was that they gave everybody a locker to stash their coat and belongings. These are in the locker room, bottom left. The second thing that we noticed was a One-Way system. How this helps in data protection is beyond me.

My desk was where I drew the smiley face. Now to get to my desk from the locker room, I first had to go back to reception. You see those big red lines? Those are security gates, very similar to the ones you see in an airport, at the point where you first have to scan your boarding pass. If you don’t have a key card with the right credentials, you won’t get in. So when you get through gate number 2, then past reception and through security gate 1, then there are two more security *doors*. Those are the thin red lines.
So now we have to follow the green dots all the way around the floor, until I finally arrive at my desk.

Oh, wait, I have to go to the toilet. See where I drew the toilet? It’s about 15 yards from my desk. So now I have to go through another security door, go to the toilet and then.. Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you- all those security doors and security gates are one way. So I can’t get back to my desk, 15 yards away, through this security door. I have to exit through security gate 2, back to reception yet again, through security gate 1, then the 2 security doors, and then make the trek around the entire floor again to get back to my desk. Very efficient, right?
A Russian colleague of mine once remarked, only half joking, that the only place where he had ever seen indoor security measures like that was at the Israeli embassy.

How this nonsense is in any way contributing to data protection is beyond me. I have asked our management this question at least half a dozen times, but none of them could answer it.
So now, I’m finally back at my desk. Let’s have a look at it. What is on my desk?
My laptop, a mouse and a set of earplugs *with* wires. Because, in the interest of data protection, Bluetooth headphones give off a signal and are therefore not allowed. You think that is ridiculous? Oh, boy, to quote The Carpenters: we’ve only just begun.
So we’ve had the hardware. What else is there?

Nothing.

The new policy put a ban on pretty much everything. We were no longer allowed to have paper or a pen on our desk. No personal items like photos of holidays or your loved ones or anything else. No pennant from your favorite football club, no mobile phone, nothing. Everything except the clothes on your back had to be left in your locker. They even, at first, told us that we had to leave our wallets in the lockers too, but that’s where most people drew the line. 

I once again asked management how leaving your wallet in a locker will add to data protection security but, as always, the answer was silence.

By now, morale was at an all time low. People hated being treated like prisoners and productivity dropped significantly, partly because the locker room was now constantly abuzz with people checking their mobile phones and having a snack because, ofcourse, food at your desk, even a candy bar, was also prohibited.

The by far most ridiculous of these new rules came a few days later when a management type came to my desk and said that my water bottle was not compliant with the new policy. I just laughed at her and went back to work, but she stayed and insisted that I put the bottle in my locker and if I wanted to drink water I could use one of the company approved glasses from the kitchen. When I pointed out that, if I had to drink my water from those small glasses in the kitchen, I would have to refill it at least 20 times a day, which would mean making the 3 minute tour around the floor every time. She then reluctantly let me have my bottle.
You think this was absurd? Well, I got one final ace up my sleeve.
 

A few days later, a number of boxes arrived in the kitchen and we received an e-mail informing us that company-sanctioned water bottles were now available in the kitchen and that, as of tomorrow, those were the only water bottles allowed at your desk.
You may think I’m making this up, and believe me I wish I did, but that is what happened.
That’s when most people decided that it had been enough and this was just one step too far. Only a few people picked up a bottle and the rest just ignored the rule, despite continuous pleas from management who, time and again, when asked for an explanation as to why this rule was in place, never had an answer. 

And then.. then COVID happened.

On Monday the 16th of March 2020, we were all sent home. Those with laptops took them with them, and those that worked on PCs were told that their equipment would be delivered to their homes in the next few days.
Ofcourse, in those early stages, nobody could possibly have foreseen how long this would eventually take.
I put my laptop in my backpack and said to my colleagues “Okay, guys, see you in a few weeks”

I never saw them again.

Arrogance and Ignorance

Because the tech help desk suddenly had to authorize 7000+ people for working from home, it took about 10 days for me to get going again. I would check my laptop at 6AM, the start of my working day, and would find that I had no remote access. I would then go back to bed for a while, have breakfast, do a bit of reading and writing and try again at midday, only to find that I still had no access. For me that was the sign that I had tried enough for the day, so I would go for a walk. That walk would normally end in a pub, but that was the sudden weirdness of the situation- the pubs were all closed. This really left a mark on me. The absence of pubs left such a big hole in my life that I really didn’t know how to cope with it. I wrote about this before HERE so I’ll skip the subject for now.

So, the initial few weeks after we all got reconnected, it was a bit weird, sitting alone in your kitchen or living room and only talking to your colleagues via chat apps or video calls, but we soon found our rhythm and work went back to normal. The thing is- it just worked. After a few months, everybody realized that we didn’t need to sit together in a physical building to make this work. As long as we kept communication open, everything went fine. In those nearly 2 ½ years that we worked from home full time, we met every deadline, SLA and KPI, and for the past year we had quality scores that were higher than they ever were while working in the office. It just worked and everybody was happy with the situation. On top of that, the number of sick days dropped dramatically, by about 95%.

Then, in March of this year, we received a survey. Now let me first explain something. Our original office was in an office park on the edge of Dublin city centre. A lot of people, especially the ones who were there for a bit longer, were very happy with that location and possibly even moved to the area because of that. Let’s call this Office A. Then, they had made some vague announcements a few months earlier about a new office that was located in a place called Sandyford, which is on the furthest Southern outskirts of Dublin, in the middle of nowhere, bordering the Dublin mountains. Let’s call this Office B.

The survey was simple, it contained only 1 question:

Where would you prefer to work, going forward:
1. From home

2. Office A

3. Office B

They never published the results but I did a bit of a straw poll myself, and 90% of the people voted for working from home, 5% for Office A and the rest were a few people who didn’t care either way, and a handful of people who happened to live near Office B.

So, with the whole “We listen to our employees wishes” rhetoric that they had been throwing around for the past 7 years, and the whole “Work-life balance is important” thing, we were all confident that we would, at the very least, get the options for a hybrid work model- 1 or 2 days in the office, and the rest at home. 

Weeks passed and nothing happened, which for us was good news. Then, in early April, our managing director, who is in charge of our business unit and one or two others, called a Town Hall. This is a management term that means “video meeting”.
Our managing director was a hautain, phony snob called Mich[NAME REDACTED]. I never liked her because, on the rare occasions that she bothered to come down to our office, she never had any interest in the people, apart from  our general manager but, at the same time, if you passed her in the hallway, she would always pretend to know who you were and give you some empty compliment like “Keep up the good work, you’re doing great!”.

For this town hall meeting, she had conveniently switched off all interruption microphones. This was, in her opinion, because there were too many people on the call, so it may become chaotic, but in reality she did it because she knew what was coming.
She started off with the usual blah blah about how great we were doing and how much she appreciated it etc etc. 

And then.. Then started the biggest clusterfuck in the whole 7 year history of the project.

She told us that from the first of May, they were going to move people back into the office. She then showed a short slideshow with photos from Office B. and proclaimed that it was state of the art and we would love it. Because all microphones had been shut off, people took to the meeting chat. Hundreds of questions were dropped in there within minutes. Initially she ignored them, but when the tidal wave of questions continued, she finally had a look at them.
And she answered one. Most questions were, ofcourse, about the possibility to continue working from home.
The only thing she said was “All our roles are office based”. When people threw in her face that we had been working from home for over 2 years and that everything was going fine, she simply ignored the rest of the questions, told us that we could get more details from our supervisors and she ended the call.

The next 2 weeks were chaotic to say the least. Everybody had questions but nobody had answers. Could we still work from home, or in a hybrid model? Could we still work in Office A? 

Nobody could tell us anything.

It was by now clear to management that, to put it mildly, people had no intention of working in Office B because, for most people, that would mean wasting 3 or 4 hours of their day on commuting while they were perfectly capable of doing their jobs from home.

For me and my team, there was another problem- we didn’t have a supervisor. Our previous supervisor had taken a month of leave over a year earlier, went home to Belgium to sort out some personal issues and.. Well, he never returned. 

Ofcourse, nobody ever informed us of this so when I asked our operations manager months later when he would be back, she simply told me “He doesn’t work here anymore”.

By now, the resignation letters had started flying around like confetti at the Rio carnival. One  of our senior trainers simply sent in an e-mail with words along the lines of “I hereby hand in my resignation. I’m calling in sick for whatever notice period is in my contract. You can pay me out however many sick days and holidays I have left.” Two of five team leaders also handed in their resignations and basically did the same. A true exodus was clearly under way.

Remember what I said at the start of the story? That I applied for a promotion and didn’t get it?
Well, that was for a management position, so if I had gotten the job, I would have been expected to act enthusiastic about the move and try to convince the workforce that the new office was great. I could never have done that so, actually, not getting the job was a blessing in disguise.

Then, they sent out a second survey. This survey consisted entirely of questions about Office B.
“What amenities can we organize for you to make your work there more pleasant?” 

“Which wellness activities would you like to see?”
“What type of snacks would you want to be available?”

They completely ignored the fact that pretty much everyone had rejected their new office plan and just acted as if everyone was happy with it and that they were saints by letting us have a say in coloring in the facilities in the building. What they completely ignored was the fact that everybody HATED the new office and nobody wanted to work there.

Fortunately, the final question of this head-up-their-ass survey was a free text field with the question “Do you have anything else you want to say?” 

I told them in no uncertain terms that I didn’t give a fuck what they did with that office. They could put a Michelin Star restaurant in the canteen with a free 3 course lunch every day, put a tournament size pool table on every floor and fill every water cooler in the building with Highland Park whisky, but that still wouldn’t change the fact that I would be wasting 3-4 hours of my day in getting there and back, which would mean that I would spend at least 50% of all my time on work. And I live in Dublin city centre. Many of my colleagues lived further away from that 7th Circle of Hell office they had come up with. 

These senior management people were so delusional that they thought that if they kept putting on some Sesame Street happy face that everybody would eventually agree and head to Office B. 

They were wrong. 

Location location location

Now, before we get to the Grand Finale of this orgy of management decision fuck ups, let’s go back about 6 months, to November 2021.
 

We were informed that the system that processes the bulk of our work would be decommissioned in mid December.  Why any business in its right mind would do such a big change-over a few weeks before Christmas, when everyone is clearing out their holiday balance, is beyond me, but let’s just leave that for now. 

The change-over in itself was not so much of a problem. I had gone through this 3 or 4 times before in my time with the company and how it always worked is like this:
Let’s just say that our standard workload was 100%. After they announce the deactivation of the old system, there is a 4 week period in which the workload slowly declines. So say in week -/- 4, the workload is 100%, in week -/-3 it is 80%, in week -/-2 it is 50%, in week -/-1 it is 20 or 30% and the in week zero, the week that the new system kicks in, it is 0%.

And then there is a ramp-up period for the new system so that in week 1 the workload is 20 or 30%, in week 2 it is 50% and so on until, after 4 or 5 weeks, the new system is up to 100%. 

This is where the problems started. 

Let me explain shortly, without going into details, because first of all it’s boring and second of all it wouldn’t mean anything to you unless you do this kind of work yourself, how we work. 

The main bulk of our work consists of 3 stages. Let’s call them, imaginatively, Stage 1, Stage 2 and Stage 3. 

We first noticed that the ramp up of Stage 1 didn’t happen. We had a few weeks of nothing happening and when, eventually, workload started to appear, it never got past 25-30% of what it should be. 

Then the second problem is that we found that, once we finished the diluted Stage 1 and got ready to process Stage 2, the people who had built the system had forgotten to program Stage 2 into it. And this was a crucial problem because, without Stage 2 in place, we were unable to do Stage 3 because that could only be done once Stage 2 was finished, 

So here we were, left with a system that was not even half finished which left us unable to do our job properly.

I know what you’re thinking now. It’s nice to take your foot off the gas every now and then. And yes, initially it was. If I have learned anything from working for American multinationals for the past 15 years, it is that you can never take your foot off the gas.
So, initially it was nice to work without the constant pressure of deadlines and the risk of ending up with a backlog of unprocessed work. 

It gave us the chance to do all those things that you wanted to do but never had time to get around to. 

I spent over a week re-writing all the work instructions I had written over the years, and there were many, updating the ones that were still relevant and archiving the ones that were obsolete. 

I spent a whole day managing the hundreds of bookmarks I had amassed over the past 7 years, getting rid of many of them, and re-organizing the ones that were left. 

I spent a week digging meticulously through my Google Drive, assessing countless documents, deleting thousands of them, and putting a new structure in place for the ones that I kept.
I did every single chore that I could possibly think of, and then some, but at some point, I just ran out of ideas and from then on just worked however many hours it took me to process our meagre workload and then went to the pub.

In late April, while the tsunami of resignation letter continued, overwhelming the corporate  HR department who had never seen anything like this before, we received yet another survey from the senior management team who, by now, had a public approval rating that would make Pol Pot look like your cool uncle who gives you your first beer.

This was not a survey. It was an insult. 

The first question read:

“If we give you a 1000 Euro bonus to start working in Office B in May, when could you start?”

This was now just getting pathetic. Their entire workforce told them to go fuck themselves and stick their middle-of-nowhere office some place where the sun don’t shine, so now they were trying to bribe us into going along with their plan. Apart from a few new recruits, who had been informed at the recruitment stage that they would be working in Office B and thought that, well, I’m going there anyway, so I might as well pick up a thousand bucks if I go a few weeks early, everyone told them to go to hell. 

It was now that I realized that these lunatics were really going to go through with this no matter what. There was no reasoning with them. They had set their minds on Office B and it was Their Way or the Highway. 

This was the moment I decided to head for the highway. 

End Game

My motivation to still work for these people had by now reached an all time low. There was little work to go around, everybody was in a state of rage about the way they were being treated and experienced, hard working people resigned every day.

Over the previous year and a half, I had had to replace about half of my team because they handed in their resignation, one by one, at a pace of about one every other month. And they all went to work for TikTok.
I decided to contact one of my former colleagues that I had gotten along very well with and asked her if there were any jobs going.

Yes there were.

She sent me a link to TikTok’s jobs website and asked me to let her know which jobs I was interested in, so that she could send me a referral link so that, if I were to get the job, she would get a nice bonus.
Things went very fast. The day after I put in my application, I got a Whatsapp message from a guy who identified himself as a recruiter for TikTok. We had an introductory call, the usual stuff of why I wanted to work for TikTok, how much money do you want, etc. etc. which was very positive. He asked me if I would be interested in an interview, to which I ofcourse said yes.

The very next day I received an invite for a video interview the day after that. 

These people really moved fast. My interviewer explained that this was the first interview, after that there will be a second, and then a final chat with the HR manager.

To cut a long story short, in early June, while I was in Holland for my dad’s birthday, I had the final call with the HR Manager who confirmed that, yes, I was hired and we’re going to send you a contract and a salary offer in a few days. I happily accepted her offer and went back to Ireland that afternoon, a happy man.

So now, all I needed to do was resign from Google, which I did first thing the next morning in the cozy confines of my kitchen. I felt both relieved and strange. I was leaving Google.

And yes, ofcourse, money was also part of my decision to leave. To quote a famous movie line- they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

So, that is the story of why I left Google. I logged out for the final time exactly 7 years and 2 months to the day since I started.
It was a bit scary at first- new job, new surroundings, new people, but I’m glad I did it. I’m very happy in my new job, have great colleagues and a beautiful bright new office. Yes, I am working from an office again, but only for one or two days a week. The building is smack-bang in the city centre and not somewhere out in the boonies. This is a temporary WeWork office but, in a year or so, the new permanent TikTok office will be ready and, to finish the story more or less where we started: it’s a 5 minute walk from my favorite bar.

Have a good day.