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I was a Senior Engineer with a manager who talked to me once on the day I joined the team, then forgot I existed for the next 3 months. If I had discreetly tra

by varelse 14y ago

I was a Senior Engineer with a manager who talked to me once on the day I joined the team, then forgot I existed for the next 3 months. If I had discreetly transferred without trying to repair this, I think I might have pulled it off. But instead, I mistakenly emailed him, concerned that he was holding 1:1s with everyone else on the team except for me. He then hastily called a 1:1, apologized for forgetting my existence, and then immediately informed me that I was now behind on his expectations of my productivity. My friends advised me to go to HR, so I did. Whereupon I found out he had already paid them a visit to inform them of me. At this point, the google immune system geared up to encourage me to leave of my own volition. I tried to get on to other teams. Friends in the company tried to get me onto their teams. These efforts were blocked. Deciding this was a game not worth playing further, I left a month later when I got a compelling offer elsewhere. Waste of 4 months IMO - but I also believe that if I had just been allocated to a more relevant team things would have turned out far better.

euroclydon 14y ago
I don't think I would have let that go for three months. Did you try to contact him earlier? Did you have work in those three months? Were you checking in code?
- officemonkey 14y ago
  This. After the first paper-work week, if I had a supervisor who didn't assign work to me, I would seek him out, if only to gauge his expectations.
  - varelse 14y ago
    Work was assigned to me the first day and I'm a very self-motivated independent worker when given a task. That trait had served me well right up to joining Google whereupon it flamed out because I probably put too much time into learning google's tool chain. At the 3 month meeting, the manager openly admitted that while he managed two teams, he devoted most of his energy to the other one. So in his defense, he was overallocated. His other team was more interesting. But I think he already wanted me gone at that point so that wasn't an option.
matwood 14y ago
The problem of big companies. At some point they end up with people who suck like your manager. Small companies are much better at keeping their ethos and culture. This isn't to say that small companies are perfect though. It's just easier in small companies to know what you're getting into prior to making the leap.
wahnfrieden 14y ago
What did you do for those 3 months, besides the first few days/weeks?
- varelse 14y ago
  If you're asking whether I was productive, yes, I was, just not sufficiently so apparently. My failing was explained to me that since I was a "Senior Engineer(tm)" I was supposed to arrive at google an expert in all their technologies so I could be a successful generalist and finish my starter project (in a brand new unfamiliar field to me) in <2 weeks. Whatever. In contrast, I reached productivity <48 hours after starting my next gig, which did make use of my skills.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    My failing was explained to me that since I was a "Senior Engineer(tm)" I was supposed to arrive at google an expert in all their technologies so I could be a successful generalist and finish my starter project (in a brand new unfamiliar field to me) in <2 weeks. They make up those expectations after the fact, of course. Rather than have the decency to say, "I just don't like you, and don't want you on my team" your manager had to build an objective-looking "performance" case and it sounds like he was a total twat about it. No one gets anything serious done in the first 2 weeks, and you're not expected to. That's what Codelabs (which are very good, and I wish more companies paid attention to that) are for. One thing I disliked about the Google environment was that, because it's so hard to have a real accomplishment in your first year, whether you "succeed" depends on others' assessments (i.e. politics). I prefer to be in an environment where, after 3 weeks, I can reach the "so good they can't ignore you" state. I like high-productivity environments better because I can prove, in the first month, that I'm actually worth a damn. Political issues always exist, but they're less threatening when you've already proven that you're good at what you do.
    - varelse 14y ago
      So what this implies to me is that the first year at Google is an additional hiring filter to weed out bad cultural fits who got past the previous hiring screen (which selects for walking encyclopedias of Comp Sci and recent Top Coder problems with a smattering of problem solving ability). So they intentionally remove any element of choice in allocation, and throw people into the hopefully representative ensemble of all hiring teams at Google to test how one mixes with the average ideal spherical Googler. But if one ends up 2 sigma to the left of the mean, one is pretty much hosed. And that would likely have a 2-3% false rejection rate assuming this is a normal distribution and that most Google teams are sane. Not bad actually, but sucks for me. Except that I don't think such a distribution is normal but more likely vastly oversamples the stinkers due to a twisted form of survivor bias because the stinkers have the highest departure rates, putting them constantly on the prowl for new meat oops I mean Nooglers (my small team lost several people during the short time I was on it and several Nooglers switched teams* hours before they would have started to avoid this allocation - I have a really funny photo of several sets of deflated welcome balloons next to what was supposed to be their desk after they had sat around for a couple weeks). *The most important thing I learned at Google was that I should have secured my allocation before arriving as a condition of accepting employment. Failing that, one can sidestep the process on the first day if one has a friend on a team that is in need of people if one is insistent enough.

by varelse 14y ago

euroclydon 14y ago

I don't think I would have let that go for three months. Did you try to contact him earlier? Did you have work in those three months? Were you checking in code?

officemonkey 14y ago
This. After the first paper-work week, if I had a supervisor who didn't assign work to me, I would seek him out, if only to gauge his expectations.
- varelse 14y ago
  Work was assigned to me the first day and I'm a very self-motivated independent worker when given a task. That trait had served me well right up to joining Google whereupon it flamed out because I probably put too much time into learning google's tool chain. At the 3 month meeting, the manager openly admitted that while he managed two teams, he devoted most of his energy to the other one. So in his defense, he was overallocated. His other team was more interesting. But I think he already wanted me gone at that point so that wasn't an option.

matwood 14y ago

The problem of big companies. At some point they end up with people who suck like your manager. Small companies are much better at keeping their ethos and culture. This isn't to say that small companies are perfect though. It's just easier in small companies to know what you're getting into prior to making the leap.

wahnfrieden 14y ago

What did you do for those 3 months, besides the first few days/weeks?

varelse 14y ago
If you're asking whether I was productive, yes, I was, just not sufficiently so apparently. My failing was explained to me that since I was a "Senior Engineer(tm)" I was supposed to arrive at google an expert in all their technologies so I could be a successful generalist and finish my starter project (in a brand new unfamiliar field to me) in <2 weeks. Whatever. In contrast, I reached productivity <48 hours after starting my next gig, which did make use of my skills.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  My failing was explained to me that since I was a "Senior Engineer(tm)" I was supposed to arrive at google an expert in all their technologies so I could be a successful generalist and finish my starter project (in a brand new unfamiliar field to me) in <2 weeks. They make up those expectations after the fact, of course. Rather than have the decency to say, "I just don't like you, and don't want you on my team" your manager had to build an objective-looking "performance" case and it sounds like he was a total twat about it. No one gets anything serious done in the first 2 weeks, and you're not expected to. That's what Codelabs (which are very good, and I wish more companies paid attention to that) are for. One thing I disliked about the Google environment was that, because it's so hard to have a real accomplishment in your first year, whether you "succeed" depends on others' assessments (i.e. politics). I prefer to be in an environment where, after 3 weeks, I can reach the "so good they can't ignore you" state. I like high-productivity environments better because I can prove, in the first month, that I'm actually worth a damn. Political issues always exist, but they're less threatening when you've already proven that you're good at what you do.
  - varelse 14y ago
    So what this implies to me is that the first year at Google is an additional hiring filter to weed out bad cultural fits who got past the previous hiring screen (which selects for walking encyclopedias of Comp Sci and recent Top Coder problems with a smattering of problem solving ability). So they intentionally remove any element of choice in allocation, and throw people into the hopefully representative ensemble of all hiring teams at Google to test how one mixes with the average ideal spherical Googler. But if one ends up 2 sigma to the left of the mean, one is pretty much hosed. And that would likely have a 2-3% false rejection rate assuming this is a normal distribution and that most Google teams are sane. Not bad actually, but sucks for me. Except that I don't think such a distribution is normal but more likely vastly oversamples the stinkers due to a twisted form of survivor bias because the stinkers have the highest departure rates, putting them constantly on the prowl for new meat oops I mean Nooglers (my small team lost several people during the short time I was on it and several Nooglers switched teams* hours before they would have started to avoid this allocation - I have a really funny photo of several sets of deflated welcome balloons next to what was supposed to be their desk after they had sat around for a couple weeks). *The most important thing I learned at Google was that I should have secured my allocation before arriving as a condition of accepting employment. Failing that, one can sidestep the process on the first day if one has a friend on a team that is in need of people if one is insistent enough.