In retrospect, "fixed-term employment" at Google was a bit like getting laid off slowly, over the course of a year. But finally, on April 3rd 2009, I turned in my badge and walked out the door a free man. The sun was shining, a cold wind stung my face, and for the first time in five years, I looked ahead to doing something completely new.
Five years ago, the company I joined still referred to itself as "Performics," though New York-based DoubleClick had just acquired it. My first two years were spent helping bring its search engine advertising product up to the standards of the new owners. This entailed long nights and weekends of putting out fires, rewriting entire chunks of the system, and working with my colleagues to figure out how we could bring some discipline and predictability to our little start-up operation. I stepped towards professional maturity even as the company did. By 2006, we were calling ourselves "DoubleClick." I became an engineering manager and had grown a staff of programmers under me in Chicago and coordinated its efforts with a team of offshore developers in India. I got married, and shortly after getting back from my honeymoon, was asked to spend two weeks of every month in New York, managing another team there. There's no quicker way to learn to fly than to be thrown off a building. If I didn't exactly soar all the time, I didn't crash through the pavement either, and as a team, we managed to do a lot of good. When I attended our product's posh commercial launch party at the top of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, it was hard not to be stunned by how far and fast we had come.
In early 2007, we at DoubleClick learned that Google had made a $3.1 billion bid to purchase us. There was fanfare up and down the rows of the software development cubicles. At heart, most of us still thought of ourselves as "Performics," and the prospect of being embraced by the legendary Shangri-La of software engineering was dizzying. None of us was under the illusion that we were doing anything but sneaking into Google's back door. None of us had the "preferred" PhD specified on Google's public job postings, and few of us believed we could pass their infamous interview process. But our management gave us carefully non-committal reassurances that we had good prospects for surviving the transition. We had launched and maintained a revenue-generating product. We had domain expertise in a hotly-contested field. Surely Google would value these things. These were our mantras during the year in which the U.S. and European legalities of the acquisition were settled.
On Tuesday March 11th 2008, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced, "As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount. We expect these to take place in the U.S. and possibly in other regions as well. We know that DoubleClick is built on the strength of its people. For this reason we'll strive to minimize the impact of this process on all our clients and employees." What we didn't know is that the "Googlers" (what Google employees call themselves) were themselves grumbling about the acquisition. Google had been acquiring companies in force, and privately admitted that it didn't handle the integrations well. Many of the long-time Googlers felt that their elite membership was being diluted, and their standards were being compromised. The product Google wanted from DoubleClick – display advertising – was run out of New York; there was considerable debate whether satellite (no – "distributed") offices like Chicago should be brought in at all. The mood in our office grew tense in those final weeks, and as a manager, it was my job to provide vague reassurances even as I stack-ranked my staff with the knowledge that someone would merge my list with others and draw a strike-line, separating the "ins" from the "outs." Rumor said that the bloodletting would happen on Friday April 4th, but privately, my boss told me and my fellow engineering managers to make sure everybody was in the office on Wednesday the 2nd. That night, I told my wife that if any of my team was cut, I'd want to be among them; I'd have a hard time dealing with the loss of any one engineer. The next day, I got the chance to live up to my words.
There were three possible fates for a DoubleClick employee that Wednesday: to be laid off outright, to be converted to a full-time Googler, or to be placed on a fixed-term contract. My boss pulled me aside just as I walked in the door, and told me that my team was safe. But I would be put on fixed-term employment for one year, and then laid off. My ego folded like a broken lawn chair. How did this happen? There was nothing in my performance, qualifications, or even popularity that could have predicted it. Later, I would learn that the "merged list with a strike line" was an over-simplification of the process by which Google eliminated 25% of DoubleClick-Chicago's workforce. Great people were terminated, including our Senior Director, whom many of us low-level managers saw as a mentor. At the time it was hardly a comfort.
I continued contributing as best I could during that final year, taking advantage of the vast learning opportunities Google afforded. My boss wanted to find a way to convert me to full time status, but the ways of getting things done in the Google bureaucracy eluded us all. Conversion was a possibility dangled in front of me from the very beginning of my Google tenure, but I quickly learned to put it out of my mind – it was a hope that carried too much painful baggage. By all accounts, conversion could only be gained by going through Google's "front door" interview process, and I wasn't interested in being rejected twice. After our team's third "realignment" in January, this time under a Director from the Pittsburgh office, my boss found someone who seemed sympathetic to his cause. This new Director said he would do what he could to make sure Google "corrected its mistake" and kept me on – and he appeared to have the political savvy to do so.
At the beginning of my final month, the Director set up a meeting with his HR recruiter to instruct me on what I needed to do to keep my job. The recruiter told me that I would have to go to Mountain View for a battery of five one-hour engineering interviews involving brain-teasers and writing code on a whiteboard. I would also need to supply two references, external to Google – despite the fact that anyone who could be a reference in the last five years now either worked for Google, or wanted to hire me into his own organization. The process was no different than off-the-street applications, except that I was guaranteed the face-to-face interviews. It was insulting. I was hired into Performics/DoubleClick after two months working there as a consultant – I was given no interview, and was asked to name my price. But it wasn't enough for Google that I had worked for them a year, and that even one of their Directors considered me "essential to the product's success." On the morning I told my boss that I would not be pursuing the conversion interview, I felt blissfully light. That feeling lasted the entire day, until at 5pm, the Director called and asked what he could do to change my mind – there may even be some flexibility in how the interview was conducted, he said.
My wife saw that as confirmation of something she had long suspected. They wanted me, she said, and they would find a way to make it work, acting within the process. There was no reason not to do the interview, and then I could see what Google would put on the table, and compare it with the other job opportunities I was exploring. So I studied for a week. My last computer science course was more than 15 years ago, and though most of the topics never arise in day-to-day work, Google still sees itself as a computer science R&D organization. Its culture is of computer scientists, and that would be how I was evaluated, regardless of my actual duties. The Director set up my interviews in Cambridge, Massachusetts instead of Mountain View, California so I could be interviewed by engineers in a "distributed" office who did not have as much exposure to the DoubleClick acquisition. By the time I flew there, I was cautiously optimistic. I had reminded myself how to analyze algorithms in "big-O" notation, and suggest data structures that would optimize for speed or space. I knew how to search and sort from scratch, manipulate linked lists, traverse trees, find shortest-paths on graphs, count permutations and combinations, and twiddle bits. I was as ready as I was going to be.
I bombed the interview. A non-disclosure agreement prevents me from getting into specifics, but the interview was purely technical, and while I could readily answer about half of the questions, for the other half, when I didn't glom onto the "trick" embedded in the questions, I spun my wheels. Despair is the great enemy of thoroughness and creative thinking. Once I started to sink, I sunk fast. The interviewers were friendly, even kind, but well before the end of the day, I knew I was finished. A week after the interviews, the Director confirmed it – again, with the utmost kindness. "I'm sorry – I failed," he said. "I tried to make it work, but I couldn't." But of course, it was I who had failed, and with three days left at Google, I allowed myself – finally – to check out, grumpy that I had allowed Google to slap me twice. More than anything else, though, I felt relief. I had spent a year preparing myself to leave Google, and I had already secured a job – under the same former-Senior Director whom I considered a mentor. One of the provisions of my fixed-term contract was a "completion bonus," which, combined with my severance, meant that I would walk away with 85% of my annual salary in a lump sum. For someone who had been laid off in this economy, I was in excellent – even enviable – shape.
This evening, I stopped by the old office to meet a friend. Without a key card, I had to wait for him in the lobby – a rueful feeling, in a place where I once had free rein – but I got the chance to greet several former colleagues as they left work. We chatted about what they were doing, and what I was doing, and I began to realize, hearing the familiar laments of issues and deadlines, just how refreshing it was to have finally moved on.
