Going, Going, Googley-Gone!

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 3^rd 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 11^th 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 4^th, but privately, my boss told me and my fellow engineering managers to make sure everybody was in the office on Wednesday the 2^nd. 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.

Brown Like Me

After his Republican response to President Obama's Congressional address, I declared that I was embarrassed, on behalf of Indian-Americans, about Bobby Jindal.

I do realize that statement was bold-to-ridiculous. Jindal, an honors biology graduate from Brown and a Rhodes Scholar with a Master's degree in political science from Oxford, is the youngest of the current state governors and the first Indian-American elected to that office. Jindal's speech may have been clumsy, and I might take issue with his logic, but "embarrassment" seems presumptuous. I was challenged, however, not on comparative credentials, but on my speaking on behalf of Indian-Americans. Said one friend-of-a-friend, "that would be like me being embarrassed of Timothy Geithner on behalf of Caucasians...sounds silly doesn't it?"

This is the point when dialogue shuts down. At this point, the brown person tells the white person he doesn't understand what it is to be a minority, and the white person asks how we can make progress if we don't "move beyond race." Bobby Jindal certainly seems eager to move beyond his race. In high school, he converted from his parents' Hinduism to Catholicism, and he even changed his given name, "Piyush," to the slice of Americana with which he best identified: Bobby Brady, of "The Brady Bunch." He speaks with a folksy drawl, and has named his youngest son "Slade." In an interview on "60 Minutes," Bobby and his wife Supriya said that their Indian heritage doesn't really factor into their daily lives. They were raised American. No doubt this makes Bobby Jindal more palletable to a constituency that elected a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan to Congress.

I was also raised American. Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, there were only about one hundred Indian-American families in town. My circulation within that small community was limited to being dragged to weekend parties, where I spent evenings with the other kids in someone's basement, watching TV, while our parents upstairs spoke, ate and dressed "Indian." Most of my friends were not Indian, and with those few who were, our ethnic bond felt incidental, an artifact of our parents more than ourselves. And yet, whenever I'd see an unknown South Asian face on the sidewalk or in a store, something curious would happen. One or both of us would catch the other's eye, smile, and nod. Sometimes those smiles would become small-talk. Sometimes the small-talk would try to become conversation, though I shied away from it. This was not something that would happen with passers-by of any other ethnicity. It continued when I moved to Chicago, where Indian faces were by no means rare. It continued wherever I would travel to where Indians were a minority. My brown face gave me an automatic kinship, welcome or not, with other brown faces. I didn't think much about it -- it's part of who I am.

Indian cuisine, music and cinema has seen a surge of popularity in the United States. It doesn't make sense for me to feel validated by that, any more than it does to feel kinship with a stranger because of our skin. But from having seen many Indian-Americans high-fiving at "Slumdog Millionaire's" eight-Oscar victory, I can tell I'm not alone. I suppose it's a little like rooting for the home team; you may not be on the field yourself, but somehow, their pride in victory is yours, as is their humiliation in defeat. Maybe I'm wrong to look at Bobby Jindal's brown face and believe that he represents "my kind" in the public forum. It's obvious from his beliefs that he doesn't. And if his success was abetted by his renunciation of his heritage and name, well, who am I to judge? But when I hear him using Hurricane Katrina as an argument against Federal funding, or advocating the teaching of Intelligent Design despite holding an Ivy League biology degree, I wish that, in the eyes of this country, he looked a little less like me.

Fixtures

A cousin of mine recently commented that she was strangely comforted by seeing the same people hanging out in a coffee shop she revisited after nine years. I share the sentiment. If life is a journey that sometimes doubles back on itself, it's comforting to have these fixtures in the landscape. They reassure one that some things do endure, remind one of good times, and even prove, by contrast, how far one has come. I don't think the pleasure they give is the same thing as nostalgia, which romanticizes the past. If anything, these fixtures look a little smaller, a little humbler, than when they were first encountered. These are not the people or things that have grown with me. They are the things that, in some ways, I've left behind.

A tiny sampling of the fixtures in my personal landscape, in no order of significance:

• My mother's childhood home in Nagpur, India -- though how much longer it will remain a "constant" is up in the air
• The Omaha Public Library, near the house where I grew up -- specifically, the outside ledge that used to be my hideout
• The Comic Book Guy at the Dragon's Lair in Omaha -- I went back recently, and he still runs his shop after more than 30 years
• The Omaha Community Playhouse, where my Junior High self was inspired to fancy myself a "theater afficionado"
• Buffalo Joe's, in Evanston, my first exposure to the Buffalo Wing
• The Lakefill at Northwestern, where I took many walks, discussing many things that seemed vitally important at the time
• Old Peculier Ale -- shared with Jon at Mr. Toad's in Omaha, my first "pub hangout"
• The Briarwood apartments in Madison, my first home-on-my-own
• The Espresso Royale on State Street and the terrace by the Student Union -- my Madison reading haunts when I didn't want to be by myself, but I had nobody to call
• The bars near State and Division in Chicago, where we started our evenings with such hope, and ended them with such disappointment -- and kept repeating the cycle
• The Michigan Avenue offices of the National Association of Realtors, where I spent some of the richest unproductive hours with Mike and Francisco
• The Kopi Cafe in Andersonville where I went on two dates; the second of which led to marriage
• More music, books and movies than I could name

My contract with Google will be over in April, which means that I'll soon be bidding farewell to people and a product with whom I've worked for five years. In times of change, these little touchstones put things in perspective. I will move on. I'll grow, and change, and acquire wisdom. And it'll be better than okay.

But no, I'm still not going to my high school reunion!

Inauguration From the Office

We ducked out of our meetings to watch Obama's inauguration from our big "tech talk" videoconference room. We're a predominantly liberal lot, and the one guy who clapped when Obama thanked Bush for his service was briefly the focus of some sixty stares. Ironic, then, that the big screen was tuned to FOX news. I wasn't as moved as the people we saw on TV, even some in the room. I did vote for Obama, and I recognize the history unfolding, but some of the catharsis I see worries me. This is no "mission accomplished;" this is the beginning of a hard, long road. I'm happy we have a smart man in the White House, but even so, progress will be hard-won. I'm hoping that the emotion I saw was not the joy over a supposed savior, but a hopeful rededication of purpose on behalf of all citizens. We'll see.

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Hitting the Bottle: Turley 2005 Howell Mountain Zinfandel, Dragon Vineyard

It's the premier of the final half-season of Battlestar Galactica. We have a Lou Malnati's deep-dish pizza in front of the television, and it's time to hit the bottle. This time, it's a 2005 Turley Zinfandel I've been saving. It's a pretty, translucent color in the glass, like the skin of a black cherry. It smells like I just stomped through a field of red raspberries, but underneath that, there's a whiff of something like Coca-Cola. If they made Raspberry Coke, it would smell something like this. And on the first taste... if cola wasn't sweetened by anything but a squeeze of blackberry juice, that'd come close to the flavors. But this is a hefty sip with tannins that stay on your tongue with a taste that'd come from something smelling of cedar. A couple of years ago, I tried a bottle of this wine that was a fruit-bomb, a riot of raspberry and blackberry jam with lots of pepper and woody spice. Now, it's a little more calm and smooth. This is a food wine, but this pizza isn't the right match. This wine wants something savory, something roasted. Slow-cooked beef ribs, where the meat falls off the bone. No barbecue sauce, mind you. Just roasted meat and the subdued blackberry and cedar of this wine.

Glass number two. Maybe my pizza smell is overwhelming it, but blackberries and cola are tight, reluctant to waft out of the glass. A deep sniff gives me a red streak of raspberry, jazzy and then gone. Is this Turley past its prime? It has been lying around the condo for more than a year, subject to B's 80-degree thermostat and Remy's incessant tail-swatting. I'll get this pizza out of the way... There we go -- dried raspberries and blackberries, and the first sip fills the mouth with dry, woody fruit and spices. This is not a cocktail wine -- you have to keep eating, or it'll suck the moisture out of your mouth. Feh. This wine is too somber. Turley, I remember when you were fun. What happened? I don't have any barbecue for you, and you're just clobbering this tomato sauce.

Glass numbers three. And four. Okay, this isn't a wine for my pizza, so it's time to start dealing with it on its own terms. It's giving me some fruit -- dry and almost bitter -- and a lot of scented wood. This is good. This is a dry dinner wine. It's also thick and hefty in the mouth -- thick as whole milk. Salty bacon bits from our salad make the fruit a little brighter, but this is still dark, deep stuff. After some salt-and-savory, I got a mouthful of blackberry jam with a peppery bite. These are spikes. This wine wants to percolate in the lower registers; it talks like Brando in The Godfather -- nearly incomprehensible if you're paying attention, but sit back, let your mind wander, let its tastes play around on your tongue. This is actually a damn good wine. I'm sorry I doubted you Turley. You're A-OK in my book.

My wife is telling me to drink water. This is a good idea. It's time to say night-night to Turley. I'll see you again when I have barbecue. Or pot roast. Yeah, that'd rock.

Winter Whiners

It has been snowing for days here in Chicago. There has been a lull today -- but that was just because the temperature dropped into the negative double-digits, obliterating moisture at the molecular level. This happens every year. And every year, we Chicagoans start to whine. "Why do we live here?" "This town isn't fit for human habitation." But, of course, it is, and we do. The perpetually cheery kids who want "a moment of your time" to save the environment/children/whales are still standing at every corner in the Loop. The homeless guys are still out in force, asking for change, somehow less bundled-up than they are in the summer. And the Urban Professionals like me scurry from their warm lofts to trains/busses/cabs to the office and then back again, bitching about the weather to whomever will listen.

And we all listen, because we're from Chicago, it's winter time, and we're bound together in our annual ritual of suffering. Chicago folks know how wind off the lake can cut through four layers of clothing. We know how shoes and pant legs from the knees down become a dull, uniform gray from the salt. We know how frozen nostril hair crunches as we breathe. And we know that the skin in that unprotected oval between the bottoms of our hats and the tops of our scarves can bypass the sensation of "cold" entirely and go straight to "pain." Most of us have a story about having to eat snow off the roofs of our cars while stuck in an icy five-hour traffic jam. We tell these stories to our friends-in-warmer-climates. It makes us feel tough by comparison, and it makes them feel smart by comparison. Everybody wins.

I do think Chicago blossoms in the summer precisely because it suffers through the winter. The warm weather is a catharsis. It is not taken for granted. But I like winter in itself too, though I don't say that where my wife will hear. Few scenes are as hauntingly lovely as moonlight reflected on new snow, the hush in the air as it falls in big, fluffy flakes. The gray, dirty city turns clean and white, if only until morning. Remy likes it too: after a snowfall, he charges through snow banks, pokes his nose under the drifts, and chases after snowballs that vanish on impact. After the snow falls, the landscape is new, bright, and begging to be explored.

Hitting the Bottle: Jessup Cellars 2003 Estate Bottled Cabernet Sauvignon

It has been snowing nonstop for the last two days, I'm still achey from working out for the first time in months, and it's time to hit the bottle. Jessup Cellars, 2003 Estate Bottled Cabernet Sauvignon, which Bela and I brought back from Napa Valley.

Oh yeah -- plum-dark and thick enough to be opaque, and it smells like spiced blackberry jam. And cream. That comes from the oak, right? Another sniff -- gingerbread. But enough foreplay. Time to drink up.

Thick as milk, this one, and spicy -- cinnamon and pepper -- and raspberries. This is like raspberry jam on a fresh-baked scone. (It's smelling like bread now. That soft, fresh-baked white bread that's just out of the oven and light as air. With a bit of nutmeg floating in the background. It's like Christmas at a baker's house.)

Okay, glass number two. Or is it three? I dunno, we're watching the first half of Battlestar Galactica Season 4, in preparation for the premier this month. The glass keeps refilling. It's so good, though. I can't say that it pairs with the super nachos I made for our BSG marathon, but what would? Nachos are beer food. And maybe Malbec food. But hey, it has spiced ground sirloin, so that kinda goes with a spicy, jammy Cab. Nah, not really, but that's okay -- it's big enough to trounce even my nachos. This reminds me of those gigantic Australian numbers, the Shiraz wines and such.

Last glass of the bottle. So yummy. If there was a BYOB serving venison with a raspberry sauce, this would be the bottle I'd bring. This stuff is like velvet on the tongue. There are tannins, sure, but they're soft. Silky, even. And just like that, it's gone. My beautiful Jessup Cab is no more. And we have five more episodes of BSG on the DVR. But 'tis the nature of pleasure to be ephemeral. Goodbye, fair Cab. Until the next.