It’s been a week since my last day at Google after being laid off in the round they announced in March, then getting a 49% verbal offer for another role at the company, then told that the role was eliminated when more sales organization changes were made.
Most of the sales execs affected by the reorganization will find other roles within Google. According to a Google exec, a small number — about half a dozen people — may leave the company under the reorganization.
How nice that is for most of the sales execs.
So how do I feel a week later? It’s clear that I still feel a bit hurt and just mentally punished by the whole thing, a lot of which is self reinforced through my own thoughts, sure, but really this was one event in my life that I felt signified the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. And I tried to be strong as best I could, but in the end I found myself building with emotion, nostalgia, self doubt about being laid off, etc. And I felt grateful for the opportunity I was given and generally tried to communicate that to some people, but I largely felt ignored by all of it.
See, when you’re the one being laid off, everyone else can easily be all “yeah man that sucks…” but it surprised how much I got a lot of “whattayagonnado.” More people than I’d wish to recount expressed this sentiment to me, including my boss that submitted my name for layoff consideration then gave me a sub-par review because, in his words, “your client and company contributions were huge, immeasurable, and necessary in this role, but in this round we chose to honor team work commitments over client contributions.” Funny way to manage a client-service organization if you ask me, but maybe that’s why I’m not a manager. Or how about the HR reps that actually gave me a line about how the economic downturn caused this, and that “no one was to blame.”
In a word — BULLSHIT.
I’ll tell you who’s to blame — GOOGLE, that faceless corporate behemoth that has more data about how humans live these days than any one single Government does. AND THIS IS WHERE I FEEL THE WHEELS FALL OFF OUR PRECIOUS LITTLE SYSTEM OF CAPITALISM THAT EVERY SINGLE RICH PERSON IN AMERICA THINKS IS WORKING WELL FOR THE REST OF THE COUNTRY. When no one is to blame for the fact that 200 people were just let go, when arguably they were all contributing more to the company (in sales and marketing roles) than, say, a 200-person set of engineers and product folks that are working on products costing the company more than it’s making back, I really have to wonder if anyone considered that. I sure as hell hope so, and whoever that person was that got to make that decision, or whatever committee that was, they get to skirt responsibility and accountability in the entire thing by blaming their own mistake in over-investing in certain areas, a decision someone else made some other time, and by predicting based on their own rich and deep-ass pockets that this is the best for the company. One wonders how much stock gain all those precious execs just picked up by sending us 200 home.
On another note, I specifically wonder if this line about Google coming up with an algorithm to predict employee turnover is a complete line of bullshit. I know absolutely nothing other than what I read in the WSJ about it, and to me it simply smells of a response to media pressures that the company is clearly starting to lose talent in all the key places it needs to be retaining it (say, on AdWords client technical support roles, for instance).
Finally I had to give up and pack my things and get walking. Time to say good-bye.
So, if you know anything about me, you’d know that I couldn’t help but write my good-bye email in a tone that not only showed some level of professionalism but a tone of sarcasm and doubt. My goal was to communicate my feelings that this is not something that needs to just be accepted. Maybe some folks would get some doubt about how comfortably they’re sitting at the company they invested a lot in themselves, because in some ways I do not feel that anyone that found themselves in a similar situation would just throw up their hands and feel all c’est la vie. (Read: I WORKED ON A PRODUCT THAT MADE THE COMPANY MONEY).
Here’s what I wrote:
If you have no idea who I am or generally didn’t like me all that much, you can stop reading this email.
Hi all –
Today is my last day at Google before moving onto greener and less bureaucratic pastures, so I wanted to extend a hearty thank you and good-bye to my friends and colleagues at the company before my inbox gets shut off. ;)
For a journey that started in late March, 2006 in Chicago at a quickly-growing startup called FeedBurner to my final days at Google in San Francisco serving as support for our talented sales force, I’ve happy to have come so far with such a great group of people. I will miss most of you with all my heart.
So, I can be reached at justinwardo@gmail.com or at my cell — 415.205.2604 — and please do keep in touch, at least virtually. I’m on all the latest social networks that aren’t Google-related, so I should be easy enough to find. Also, a special plea for anyone I worked with closely that thought I did some good stuff every once in a while — please recommend me on LinkedIn so I can actually publicly take some of this great knowledge to another company that may value the contribution a bit better.
If you’re still reading this, you probably like me at least a little bit and may be wondering what’s next for me. Right now I’m the drummer for a pretty awesome Bay Area band called The Actors, and our plans for world domination are coming together nicely. When I’m not sweating behing a drumset, you can usually find me blogging about a subject I’ve always been really passionate about — live music — at the aptly named site I started a few years back called Live Music Blog.com. I also plan on writing a book called “Captain Obvious and a Guide to Branding,” so let me know if you have any publisher friends that may want to pick it up.
Other than that, I want to thank everyone involved in providing this opportunity to me in the first place (with special big-ups to the FeedBurner team).
Sincerely questioning your new authority,
——Justin Ward (justinwardo@gmail.com)
I wrote it and let the drafts sit over the course of my final morning, and right before I went to turn in my computer I shot off this note. Some responses included “finally some honesty in one of these…” to “you sound bitter, i hope everything works out.” My friends told me I came off as “pained” and “whiny,” both of whom still have their jobs at the company. The director of the office I was in emailed me and thanks me for my contributions when I served under his command, and I got a lot of local folks saying “keep in touch.” But really, I feel that the door to this world may have been shut to me the second they shut off my corporate email address.
There’s something so oddly course-correcting about this entire Google experience for me that I purposely canceled an interview today for a position doing what I was doing back in my FeedBurner glory days. Is the economy bad? Sure. Do I want money to make sure I can continue to live in this wonderful city? Absolutely. But I’m not passionate about the idea of investing what I just invested in a job and career at a company to have it cut short by someone else’s likely-to-be-a-dumbass self-serving decision. I just can’t sleep on that anymore. It doesn’t feel right to me and I’m sure my Aunt won’t want me to write this, but I just can’t fake that shit anymore.
So I’m taking some time off and giving myself some time to think. I think it’ll be good for me.
Now that my Google vision is all hindsight, it really was a great place to work if you want to meet great people that strive to be successful in life, love, spirit and practice. That is something I’ll miss greatly. I’ll also miss Larry and Sergey’s mannerisms and accents when presenting at anything exec related. Always laugh-out-loud funny and they usually weren’t trying all that hard (you could tell). Other than that, I wouldn’t recommend for anyone to break their back to try and get a position there, especially in the near future. I’d start looking to a new future if I were you.
A final note to anyone that actually read this far — please note that this is my opinion only. It is the opinion of a 27-year old that moved from Chicago pursue what-he-hoped-to-be a long and fruitful career with a company he loved and was unbelievably proud to work for. So maybe it comes off as whiny to you, just like it did to a friend of mine that’s been laid off in the past, but understand that I only wanted to point to a larger problem in the automatic concession of a “thems the breaks” mentality in Corporate America these days. It’s not the real world, people. And it scares the shit out of me.
Tagged as:
Google
