Words. Ideas. Actions.

01 February 2023

As we start February, I’m feeling more than a little melancholy about not being a part of my team at Google. Yes, there’s the very real pressure to line up something new soon so that we can continue to pay our bills (Congress, they’re just like us!), but I’m also lamenting the loss of one of the roles I played in our org: writing our monthly Diversity and Inclusion newsletter.

At the start of every month since December 2020, I would publish a handful of links to share with our team. These included internal events, outside resources, book recommendations, relevant podcast episodes, and the like, to help foster a greater sense of belonging on the team and more broadly as a part of Google. It was work I enjoyed. And cherished. Although I didn’t get a chance to gather this year’s stats on how we were doing, anecdotally our D&I group heard we were definitely making a difference. 

Now, I don’t want you to think that this was an extra task we took on. On the contrary. As part of our job descriptions, we were highly encouraged to add a people-focused working group to our daily duties. We had choice over which ones we could contribute to, and it just felt natural for me to take the lessons and activism I learned at Twitter and incorporate it into my day-to-day at Google. We didn’t have a lot of access to the sentiment metrics which HR tracked, but we were given pretty broad leeway about the topics we covered and events we could sponsor and promote. 

The February newsletter, which I started drafting a few days before the Google layoffs happened, obviously included links to our Black History Month events. But in addition to any monthly themed events, we also made a point in each edition to show our team that belonging wasn’t just an effort based on how you presented or how you’re perceived. So we also included information about things like neurodiversity (there’s an incredible internal support group at Google), parenting (working from home added a whole new component to work-life balance), and ageism in the workplace (did you know Barbara Walters started “The View” when she was 67‽).

I’m incredibly proud of the work we were doing. And gutted I can’t still be a part of it. But I know those who are still there continue to put in the work to make sure everyone on my old team knows they are seen, respected, and understood. In short, they belong. Wherever I land after this layoff, I hope to join a team with very similar priorities. 

See you tomorrow?

25 January 2023

Tonight’s post is going to be a bit of housecleaning. A few nuts and bolts, some additional context on a couple of notions, and what I’m thinking for its future. Well, barring the unpredictable, of course. So let’s get to the ’splainin’.

I’ve been trying to complete one of these every weeknight. As you probably know by now, the impetus was to keep me from Tweeting, but still give me an outlet — albeit different — to put ideas out in the world. Since I started at the beginning of November, this is my 62nd edition of Not Tweets, by my count. While I still miss the immediacy of Tweeting, Twitter has changed so much, as has the usage of the audience I was Tweeting for, posting my ideas there just isn’t the same. So, here we are.

Now, for those keeping very close track, you may have noticed a common theme in the posts’ titles. Each and every one of them is a repurposed Soundgarden song title, which does a couple of things for me:

1) Saves me from having to think up a bold headline that was SEO-worthy.
2) Puts a finite number on how many of these posts I’ve tasked myself with.

By my count (with this Wikipedia page as my source), Soundgarden released 120 songs during their existence (1984 – 2017). But since I’m not using the tiles of covers they released (nine of them), that adds up to, hopefully, 111 posts here, eventually. Which means we’re more than halfway through. 

[ Inhales deeply. ] 

Now, for one last thing: Since the Google layoffs, I’ve been much more active on LinkedIn. As I texted a friend the other day, LinkedIn is the GenX TikTok. And since I’ve been there so much, I’ve been posting links to the last few of these posts there, too. Now, even though I know that their recommendation algorithm is over-indexing on posts which include #GoogleLayoffs, these links are getting much more traction than when I cross-publish on my blog, Medium, and on Post. I know not every one of these is appropriate for inclusion on LinkedIn, but if I can find a justification for including some of them there, the readership has been surprisingly large. Thanks to any and all of you who are reading this because of a link from LinkedIn.

See you tomorrow?

23 January 2023

This was an odd weekend, to put it mildly. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday trying to distract myself by playing games and building LEGO and strolling the neighborhood with my daughter. But I felt unmoored. Adrift in the unknown. On one hand, I suddenly had unlimited time and no boundaries. On the other hand, there was an almost deafening sound of the seconds ticking down until my last paycheck. These waves of uncertainty and anxiety kept crashing against the solid rocks of undistracted time with my family and the peels of joyous laughter which grew out of that foundation. 

Schools were out here today to celebrate the start of the Lunar New Year, and with that, the King Tides have returned to the Bay Area beaches. So we took that opportunity to plan a short road trip to the tide pools in Pacifica to see what we could see. Before we left, though, I wanted to send a note to my now-former manager at Google. Enough time had passed where I thought I could put what I needed into words. I sat down at this very keyboard and just started to vent. After about ten minutes of typing, I took a deep breath, glanced over what I had written, and deleted it all. And started again. This happened two more times. With each version, I got closer to what I really wanted to say: thank you.

See, when I started at Google in 2020, I was a Senior Content Strategist. But soon after my start date, my role, and the role of many others, transitioned to more of a project management one, shepherding the creation and revision of a number product-specific Google Help Center article (for me, it was App Ads and some of the video ad products) under the new moniker of Senior Content Project Lead. This was not the position I applied for. But I was going to learn it on the job. Luckily, not long after the job description changed, so did my manager. And I say “luckily” very advisedly.

Project management was not something high on my list of talents. And early on, it showed. But I was open about my concerns and needs with my new manager, Derek, and we immediately put together a plan where I could discover and build the skills I thought I was deficient in so that I could meet the new needs of the position and the evolving expectations of our stakeholders. I definitely was not done learning when my tenure unexpectedly ended on Friday, but thanks to Derek’s guidance, I felt like I was headed in the right direction. 

I included a lot of those ideas in my email to Derek, moments before we were going to hit the road to Pacifica. In what felt like just a handful of seconds after I hit “send” on my email to him, my phone rang. It was Derek. We talked for a while, sharing our surprise and lamenting what Google has lost, but then Derek made an offer which is not surprising if you know him, but definitely not what I had expected: a continuing, ongoing career dialogue, for as long as I wanted. 

But why am I telling you all this alongside that earlier digression about the tide pools? Well, one reason is I wanted to share my gratitude for Derek publicly. The other reason is a thought I had while navigating the rocks around the tide pools today. We were traipsing carefully on rarely exposed surfaces, some slippery, some pointy, and all fresh from a recently residing tide. As I watched my wife help my daughter plot her way across pool after pool, I realized that’s basically a large part of what great managers do. Like my wife for my daughter, Derek was there to take the trip with me. And even as we were coming up with the direction and destination for me to head toward, he was by my side, holding me up when I needed, letting me choose my own places to find my footing as we forged ahead. Together. Sometimes, there was the unexpected wave or a shakier-than-expected step, but we paused, reassessed, and moved forward, always keeping in mind where we thought we wanted to go, and whether that was still the right place to end up.

It all seems too convenient to come up with a career journey analogy blog post after taking some time in nature. But isn’t that the point of these posts in the first place? I live my life, I think about the day’s events, and then I try to squeeze some nugget of wisdom or a new idea out of them for myself. And maybe for you? In any case, I want to, again, say thank you, Derek. As I mentioned in my email earlier today, I was a better Googler and a better collaborator thanks to his efforts. And I’ll use all that I learned from you every day moving forward.

See you tomorrow?

20 January 2023

This is not the post I was intending to write tonight. And, honestly, I’m not sure I’m really up for writing anything. You may have read that Google let go 6% of its workforce this morning. I happened to be one of the almost 12,000 people on that discarded list. 

So, here I sit, looking over an outdated résumé and a sudden abundance of “free” time and an apartment full of “Some Day” projects. I know I need to buckle down and land something new relatively quickly (these San Francisco rents are no joke, as I’m sure you know), but at the same time, I also know I need to feel some feelings and work through some emotions first. 

Honestly, though, all I’m feeling tonight is acceptance. I always felt lucky to have joined Google. But I know they never owed me anything. Just as I didn’t owe them anything more than the work I did for them. The devotion, I’ve learned, is to the people there, not the corporation. And for them, the emotion is overwhelmingly gratitude. It’s cliché, I know, but there’s a reason all the posts you may come across on LinkedIn over the next few days will be mentioning how much they will miss their teams. I get it. It’s what was special about Twitter. And it is what is special about my team at Google. 

If I type much longer tonight, I fear this will turn into a rambling wandering of all the half-finished ideas and partially formed thoughts of a man looking at an unfamiliar horizon, trying to plot a new path. I’ll spare you those for now. Instead, this is just a note to let you know how my day went, and to let my former team know how much I learned from them and how desperately I’ll miss them. Oh, and to let you know I’m looking for my next thing. 

See you tomorrow?