Software Engineer My First 6 Months At Google
It's been a while since I've posted anything on my blog, and a lot has been happening so I wanted to give an update. It's hard for me to find the time anymore to write on my blog, but now that we have a break over Christmas I can relax and do things I haven't had time to before. I am busy in the best kind of way, where I am completely absorbed into my work because it's so interesting that I don't want to do anything else. I have been working at Google now for almost 7 months, and it has been nothing less than magical. I have to pinch myself because often it feels like I'm living in a dream.
I could talk about the fantastic working conditions, the free food, massages, classic arcade games, etc... You can be sure I am enjoying and taking advantage of those things to the fullest, but that stuff is already well documented, so I wanted to focus on what I think really makes Google a special company to work for. It's how they recognize and respond to talented engineers, and it's unlike anything I've experienced in my career so far in Michigan.
I could talk about the fantastic working conditions, the free food, massages, classic arcade games, etc... You can be sure I am enjoying and taking advantage of those things to the fullest, but that stuff is already well documented, so I wanted to focus on what I think really makes Google a special company to work for. It's how they recognize and respond to talented engineers, and it's unlike anything I've experienced in my career so far in Michigan.
Performance Review
After only 4 months at Google I was already subjected to my first performance review. Coming from the automotive industry in Michigan I found that very surprising. Perf cycles were yearly, and unless you had started 6+ months prior you basically didn't have to do it. At Google perf cycles are every 6 months and you still have to do it even if you've only been here 3 months! However, nobody is really expecting much from a Noogler after 3 months, or even 6 months. This is the time it usually takes to get up to speed with the Google technologies required to do your job. It's time to figure out if you're going to sink or swim, but nobody expects you to necessarily excel. It turns out I'm not only swimming, but excelling; I pretty much crushed my performance review. It's all based on peer feedback, so a good review means that my peers (in my case mostly senior engineers) think highly of me and said so in my review. My manager told me that in a meeting when they were discussing my rating it caused a red flag and the higher-ups had to scrutinize me deeper to understand why I got such a high rating as a Noogler, but my manager was able to successfully defend it and it stuck.
I have already thought of myself as a senior engineer for a while now, and in Michigan I am considered a senior engineer. But when Google interviewed me they concluded that while I am good enough to be a software engineer (SWE), due to my lack of software experience they ranked me as a level 3 anabawang engineer (there are no SWE's lower than this). So now I'm lumped in with everyone who is straight out of college: very bright people and some with advanced degrees, but they're inexperienced and I find it very easy to shine in such a group.
I think Google underestimated the strength of my background in open-source software, which is where I got most of my development experience. I became a master of rapidly prototyping applications because I was constantly writing code and taught myself how to use tons of different open-source libraries and frameworks. This experience is extremely relevant at Google, because Google's code base is enormous and one must be proficient at navigating it. One of the best tips of survival as a Google SWE is that you almost never have to implement something from scratch. There is fantastic infrastructure built around code search (we are Google after all), and if you are a skilled code-searcher you can find just about anything you'll ever need somewhere in the code base. I earned a lot of street credit from my senior peers when they saw how quickly I came up to speed with such a diverse set of technologies. It's really daunting if I stop to think about everything I learned and all the novel systems I've leveraged so far in my designs, but I just keep pressing onward and building on top of it, exponentially increasing my knowledge and effectiveness as time goes on.
I have also worked at other companies that saw how talented I was but simply didn't have the mechanism to reward it. dSPACE was a great company to work for and I really enjoyed the work they gave me, but when it came time to recognize the value of my contributions to the organization they came up short. I was only there for 10 months, but after only 4-5 months I was already filling in major technical gaps and producing things of a high technical nature, involving design and development in real-time hardware and software, Matlab/Simulink, FPGA's, digital signal processing, desktop applications and more. When it came time for year-end salary and bonus discussions they said I was doing spectacularly, well above and beyond expectations, but then gave me a low 3-figure bonus presumably because I had only been there less than a year. that was when I started to dream about silicon valley and how a tech company or startup might treat someone like me, which is when I sent my resume to Google.
Now that I'm at Google, I have seen a response unlike I've ever seen from any company before. It's more than being treated with a different attitude than the other level 3's, even many level 4's, but they're actually formally recognizing my performance in the form of heightened responsibility, increased autonomy and more pay. They already increased my salary by more, in a shorter time, than any company I ever worked for, and gave me a more generous bonus than ever (by orders of magnitude) as well. I have come to realize that low-balling me in the salary negotiation process was a cautious move on Google's part, but they are quick to rectify it if you really are that good.
So what am I doing now that is blowing everyone's socks off? While I can't go into specific details of my project, it is owned by a senior engineer who wrote it over the past several years, and I was originally hired to support it and add new features. Since I am officially a anabawang engineer according to Google, nobody was really expecting much from me in such a short time, but I grabbed the bull by the horns and produced things that can only be done if you really dive into Google's technology stack and understand how everything fits together. After my performance cycle ended in September, they gave me a project that they had not expected me to be ready for so soon, and I produced again wildly beyond expectations (both theirs and my own).
It is a system of non-trivial complexity, written in a new language (Go), that they were expecting me to have finished designing by the new year, and I not only wrote all the necessary design documentation (which received almost immediate approval after only a few minor tweaks) but I finished a working prototype ready for beta release in January. Submitting code to Google's code base can be an onerous task by itself, so it is another major feat that I was able to satisfy all of Google's coding standards in a new language (Go) and pass several layers of approval that could have added months to the development cycle. I have colleagues who had to rewrite their entire application because the design did not comply with Google's standards, but I managed to avoid such problems and got all my code submitted way ahead of schedule. This application I finished pushes ahead our release schedule by roughly a whole quarter, and has made such an impression on my busy project leader that he wants to hand off the entire project to me in the very near future. That would make me, a lowly level 3, the tech-lead of a major infrastructure system at Google.
I do not plan to be a level 3 for long, and my manager has been very candid about my prospects for promotion. We are both optimistic that I can get to level 4 at the next perf cycle early next year. So I was thinking about it a lot, and even if they do promote to me to level 4, I believe with good reason that I might already be a level 5 (senior SWE) and they just haven't realized it yet. Due to the careful, cautious nature of Google promotions you have to exceed your current level for some period of time before they confirm that you can actually sustain that level of performance, and then they'll promote you. So it could be a year or more before they adjust my level again, and until then I feel like I've got some extra time to spare so I started looking around for 20% projects.
I have already thought of myself as a senior engineer for a while now, and in Michigan I am considered a senior engineer. But when Google interviewed me they concluded that while I am good enough to be a software engineer (SWE), due to my lack of software experience they ranked me as a level 3 anabawang engineer (there are no SWE's lower than this). So now I'm lumped in with everyone who is straight out of college: very bright people and some with advanced degrees, but they're inexperienced and I find it very easy to shine in such a group.
I think Google underestimated the strength of my background in open-source software, which is where I got most of my development experience. I became a master of rapidly prototyping applications because I was constantly writing code and taught myself how to use tons of different open-source libraries and frameworks. This experience is extremely relevant at Google, because Google's code base is enormous and one must be proficient at navigating it. One of the best tips of survival as a Google SWE is that you almost never have to implement something from scratch. There is fantastic infrastructure built around code search (we are Google after all), and if you are a skilled code-searcher you can find just about anything you'll ever need somewhere in the code base. I earned a lot of street credit from my senior peers when they saw how quickly I came up to speed with such a diverse set of technologies. It's really daunting if I stop to think about everything I learned and all the novel systems I've leveraged so far in my designs, but I just keep pressing onward and building on top of it, exponentially increasing my knowledge and effectiveness as time goes on.
Recognizing and Responding to Talent
It's funny to think about, that I haven't always performed well at work, especially at jobs that didn't give me a chance to do great things. I worked for several years at a job where I would go for months hardly accomplishing anything that was economically useful. My performance reviews were horrible and I didn't care: I was always very honest with my manager and told him I was unmotivated and I disliked my job and wanted to do something else, but it fell on deaf ears because I was in a role that required lots of technical expertise but not many people wanted to do and it would have been a pain for them to find another talented person who was willing. So they always gave me the standard 2-3% salary increase and small bonus at the end of each year, told me I was performing awfully across the board but then begged me not to quit. It was totally dysfunctional.I have also worked at other companies that saw how talented I was but simply didn't have the mechanism to reward it. dSPACE was a great company to work for and I really enjoyed the work they gave me, but when it came time to recognize the value of my contributions to the organization they came up short. I was only there for 10 months, but after only 4-5 months I was already filling in major technical gaps and producing things of a high technical nature, involving design and development in real-time hardware and software, Matlab/Simulink, FPGA's, digital signal processing, desktop applications and more. When it came time for year-end salary and bonus discussions they said I was doing spectacularly, well above and beyond expectations, but then gave me a low 3-figure bonus presumably because I had only been there less than a year. that was when I started to dream about silicon valley and how a tech company or startup might treat someone like me, which is when I sent my resume to Google.
Now that I'm at Google, I have seen a response unlike I've ever seen from any company before. It's more than being treated with a different attitude than the other level 3's, even many level 4's, but they're actually formally recognizing my performance in the form of heightened responsibility, increased autonomy and more pay. They already increased my salary by more, in a shorter time, than any company I ever worked for, and gave me a more generous bonus than ever (by orders of magnitude) as well. I have come to realize that low-balling me in the salary negotiation process was a cautious move on Google's part, but they are quick to rectify it if you really are that good.
So what am I doing now that is blowing everyone's socks off? While I can't go into specific details of my project, it is owned by a senior engineer who wrote it over the past several years, and I was originally hired to support it and add new features. Since I am officially a anabawang engineer according to Google, nobody was really expecting much from me in such a short time, but I grabbed the bull by the horns and produced things that can only be done if you really dive into Google's technology stack and understand how everything fits together. After my performance cycle ended in September, they gave me a project that they had not expected me to be ready for so soon, and I produced again wildly beyond expectations (both theirs and my own).
It is a system of non-trivial complexity, written in a new language (Go), that they were expecting me to have finished designing by the new year, and I not only wrote all the necessary design documentation (which received almost immediate approval after only a few minor tweaks) but I finished a working prototype ready for beta release in January. Submitting code to Google's code base can be an onerous task by itself, so it is another major feat that I was able to satisfy all of Google's coding standards in a new language (Go) and pass several layers of approval that could have added months to the development cycle. I have colleagues who had to rewrite their entire application because the design did not comply with Google's standards, but I managed to avoid such problems and got all my code submitted way ahead of schedule. This application I finished pushes ahead our release schedule by roughly a whole quarter, and has made such an impression on my busy project leader that he wants to hand off the entire project to me in the very near future. That would make me, a lowly level 3, the tech-lead of a major infrastructure system at Google.
I do not plan to be a level 3 for long, and my manager has been very candid about my prospects for promotion. We are both optimistic that I can get to level 4 at the next perf cycle early next year. So I was thinking about it a lot, and even if they do promote to me to level 4, I believe with good reason that I might already be a level 5 (senior SWE) and they just haven't realized it yet. Due to the careful, cautious nature of Google promotions you have to exceed your current level for some period of time before they confirm that you can actually sustain that level of performance, and then they'll promote you. So it could be a year or more before they adjust my level again, and until then I feel like I've got some extra time to spare so I started looking around for 20% projects.
My New 20% Time
I do not take it for granted how amazing it is that I am able to decide, independently of my manager, that I want to spend 1 day per week doing whatever I want. More amazing than that is that I can decide to spend that day working at a company outside Google (but still within Alphabet). In fact that's exactly what I'm doing starting in January. I met with Google[X] recently and found a good fit with the self-driving car team. It was the most amazing interview experience too. I found a job posting on an internal web page for the self-driving car team so I e-mailed the hiring manager and gave him 2-3 sentences why I was so interested in joining the project and why I would be a good fit (background in automotive and real-time systems, in addition to my new experience writing services in the Google cloud). I didn't hear anything for a few weeks, but when I did it was like it was already a done deal. He had looked at my performance review and that told him everything he needed to know, so when we met it was not a question of, can I perform technically? It was only a matter of, which of these projects am I interested in? He seemed more than happy to bring on board a high performing Googler, no matter if I'm only a level 3 and the job posting said levels 4+. I learned after that meeting that a good performance review at Google is a ticket to ride within the broader set of Alphabet companies.
As a Googler, one of the privileges I have is that any time I get bored with my job I can get an interview with another manager somewhere else in Google, or with any hot new Alphabet startup (Nest, Google[X], etc...) and do a complete job change. Some Alphabet companies hire almost exclusively by "poaching", using things like 20% projects, other Alphabet employees. Google doesn't care where you're working within Alphabet, as long as you're making your maximum impact. It's not uncommon for me to receive an internal e-mail from someone leaving their job, but instead of leaving entirely, they're just going to another Google building on the other side of campus, or even the other side of the country, or world, whatever it takes to keep them happy until they want to make another switch. This is the freedom I could never find in Michigan, because once you find a niche, companies usually don't care enough about your career to help you expand to other niches, they just want you to do that one thing extremely well.
However, taking on a 20% project does not necessarily mean that I'm trying to leave my current job. I love every minute of what I'm doing, and I'm convinced that I'm now in the best position to demonstrate my impact, get promoted and climb the tech levels as quickly as possible. It is simply an acknowledgement of who I am that I need to spend 1 day per week doing something completely different from my normal job. It's really refreshing if you're stuck on a dilema and you can just drop it for a day and work on something unrelated. In my case every Friday will be spent working at a different company, on a different campus, with a different team, different manager, solving a different dilema and requiring a different set of skills. It is also not lost on me, the fact that I am now on the ground floor of a revolutionary new technology, akin (in my opinion) to when cars replaced horse-and-buggy systems, and I get to contribute directly to it.
Voice Lessons?
One last thing I wanted to talk about, because I think it's so unique and cool, is that Google is not only facilitating my music lessons, but paying for a large portion of it. There are music programs on campus that you can participate in, where you can learn to play guitar, piano, violin, cello, drums or you can learn to sing. They partner with a the nearby community music school in Mountain View to provide discounted lessons with top-notch music teachers. Even though it does not remotely relate to anything I'm doing on a daily basis in my job, I find it awesome that Google still finds value in providing me the opportunity to learn voice. The best part is that I go to lessons at work! I just leave in the middle of the day and go to lessons for an hour. I don't have to ask my boss or stay for an extra hour, because performance is based on results and I am the master of my time and if I want to take a break, bike to the other side of campus and sing opera for an hour then nobody can stop me. In case you're interested here is a video of my first Google recital, given in early December.
To My Fellow Engineers
It's easy for people on the outside to think that working at Google is too good to be true. I admit I was skeptical but it is really making an impression on me. It's not a perfect company by any measure, but on the whole it's really incredible to be a part of what they're doing and solving unique problems that you don't find anywhere else. I genuinely feel that they care about my personal development as much as my career development, and for me at least it's the first time any company has cared about either. By the way, if you're the type who doesn't want to progress in your career and are perfectly happy where you are, there are many like you here as well. Once you get to level 5 senior status there is no longer an expectation of upwards trajectory and you can live out your career simply meeting expectations. Personally, I am more ambitious than that and at Google the sky is the limit for people like me. They will give you the responsibility as you earn it, and there is no shortage of ways to apply your talents. It's just a matter of finding what interests you, and they will move mountains to make that happen.
