Words. Ideas. Actions.

04 April 2023

Here’s the thing: This is the last scheduled post in this Not Tweets series. When I first came up with this exercise, I wanted an outlet for my thoughts which would replace my daily — at least — habit of sending Tweets. I also wanted some guardrails for how long this would last, so I came up with what I thought was a sufficient targeted number of posts, repurposing original Soundgarden song titles for the titles of each of these entries. Some nights, that worked better than others. And tonight is one of those others. 

I don’t really have a good tie-in for tonight’s title. In fact, I don’t really have a great topic for tonight. Some days were like that. And I think that’s a pretty good way to bring these posts to a close. Because throughout it all, life has gone on, and I’ve gotten to settle in each evening and try to make a little sense of whatever thoughts have bounced around in my head during the day. The fact that today was so historically consequential at the same time as it felt so mundane is actually a pretty great snapshot of how I’ve been feeling since I started these in November. 

Some days, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about, jotting ideas in my notebook between meetings or during dog walks or even as I misheard a song lyric. Other days, I was simply too overwhelmed with breaking news to have anything other than rambling tumbleweeds cascading around in my head. But every weeknight, I sat here for a few moments, honing fractions of ideas into whole sentences, helping to cement a snapshot of me and my brain on any given day. Through it all, the unexpected kept happening. And the fact that I kept these up through it all is honestly what I’m proudest of. 

You see, I love a routine. I rely on them. Patterns and systems and habits help calm me. Otherwise, my anxieties can get the best of me. Just the burden of putting down these words every night worked to soothe the unease of not being able to Tweet each and every thought in my head. But in a world where we’re having to reuse, and almost redefine, the word “unprecedented” almost every day, I fell back on routine as a way to keep calm, and carry on.

When I started these I was angry that a business made a business decision that I wish it hadn’t. In January, when Google announced thousands of layoffs, including my own, I was angry that a business made a business decision that I wish it hadn’t. What these posts have helped me realize, though, are a few ideas I want to capture form my future self:

1) No company should be worth more to you than you do to yourself.
2) No matter how prepared you think you are for something, you are never going to be prepared for everything, so just relax a bit.
3) No one knows what you’re going through, and you’ll never know everything someone else is going through, so give them a break.

I’m sure there are more reminders that would be helpful in the future, but I think these are a good place to stop. I love writing. I don’t love editing. I could keep writing for another hour, I’m sure. But great writing is essentially good editing. I don’t think anything in the Not Tweets collection could be called great, but there are nuggets there I’d love to revisit. And edit. And try to get them to great. So, while this is the end of Not Tweets, I hope you’ll see a more polished version of something which started here in another form in the future. Until then, thank you for allowing this experiment to go on for more than four months. And thanks for reading this, or any of these, posts. I ended each of them with the same question, “See you tomorrow?” I can tell you now, I definitely will not see you here tomorrow. But I hope to see you soon. Maybe on Mastodon? 

31 March 2023

There are a lot of opinions about how today’s economy has been recovering since the start of the pandemic. And, this is the place where I would usually say something like, “people much smarter than me can better explain where we may be headed.” But lately, I feel like nobody actually knows anything. Especially when it comes to our current economic realities, much less the future and where our prospects are headed. All I know is my lived experience. I assume that’s the same for you, too. So I want to give you a peek into what it’s been like for me, looking for work in Biden’s America, and trying to navigate a constantly changing economic landscape.

In a surprise to probably no one, I tracked my job search in a spreadsheet. Here are a few of the facts and figures that I gathered as I scrolled LinkedIn every hour, emailed people I haven’t spoken to in years, and posted a couple of hundred words here every weeknight:

70: Days since the layoff announcement
51: Blog posts since getting notified
54: Applications submitted
29: Cover letters written
7: Phone screening calls with recruiters
6: Discussions with teams and potential collaborators 
6: Unique presentations created showcasing my work and experience
4: Interviews with hiring managers
17: Written rejections 

I don’t have a lot more of these posts scheduled. By my count, the Soundgarden titles left to use are “Kristi” and “Like Suicide”. So, I plan on posting just two more (for those keeping close track, Soundgarden released 121 songs, nine of which are covers which I didn’t want to use as titles, which would bring the grand total to 112 posts since starting these in November). After that, who knows? 

I like the process that making these has forced me to go through. I feel like I’ve sharpened my thinking here in a couple of helpful places. And I know that some of  these first drafts turned into more polished thoughts and answers to questions during my interviews. It’s odd how this initial idea morphed into something so very helpful. And it just reinforces the notion that I never know what’s coming next. Even if that is one of the hardest things for my mind to accept. So, on this last official day of my Google employment, I want to say thank you to my now-former colleagues who have reached out after reading something on this blog. I hope I can find a way to keep us connected, even if it’s just through reaction emoji on LinkedIn posts. Most importantly, if you’re reading these words, I want to thank you, too, for coming on this journey with me. And as I mentioned a few nights ago, if you need help in your own search, please let me know.

See you tomorrow?

29 March 2023

I very rarely know if I’ve made the right decision. And I find that I question decisions I’ve made for a long while after. They could be big ones, like did I pick the right college, to small ones, like should I have ordered the shrimp and grits tonight instead. And as I sit here tonight, I feel that familiar feeling of second-guessing coming on again.

See, I think I’ve decided what my next gig is. I have been very fortunate to have a good amount of interest in my services since being part of the Google layoffs in January. I know that. There are a lot of talented people — and seemingly more and more every day — competing for what feels like fewer and fewer roles. So, I understand what a luxury it is to have my last paid day at Google this week, while starting something new on Monday. I just don’t know if I picked the right option. And I probably never will. What I do know, however, is I don’t think I’ll ever stop looking. Not anymore.

One thing these last few years has taught me is that you never know what’s coming. And I have also discovered — the hard way — that your only allegiance you should have is to your colleagues (both past and future), not your company. I am making a choice that’s right for me and my family today, and that’s the most important consideration. But I am going to keep my eyes and mind open to new positions for a few reasons:

1) The future is unknown and unwritten, both for you and your employer, so change can come at you in a moment’s notice, and your only true boss is yourself.
2) I want to continue stretching my understanding and my skills, so as soon as I feel like I am stagnating, I’ll look for ways to learn even more.
3) There are many highly qualified candidates on the hunt right now, and if I can help connect any of them with their next gig based on my network and teams I’ve already talked to, I am more than willing to help in any way I can.

I hope that in a few months I’ll be able to look back at this post and confidently see that I made the right choice. But there’s nobody handing out “Winning Decision” ribbons, that I know of. Instead, I’ll just have to ask myself some hard questions, and hope that I like the answers. In the meantime, if you’re reading this while looking for your next content design or UX writing gig, and you think I can help, please send me a note either here or on LinkedIn.

See you tomorrow?

20 March 2023

The job search continues. And continues to be frustrating. While I know I need to be patient, I just want to be done. Add to that the fact that there’s no real good system of feedback, and the process becomes even more demoralizing. Let’s take today as an example.

I’ve been honing a presentation of my work examples for weeks. It’s pretty solid at this point, highlighting some work I’m proud of and the collaborations which brought it to life. It’s a radically updated version of a deck I came up with when I was on the hunt in 2020. Thankfully, there was one interview panel back then where I got some valuable feedback. And I’ve incorporated it into this new, 2023 version. But that’s so, so rare these days. In one presentation today, for instance, I know I highlighted all the points I wanted to make. I tied them to the business needs of the position I was interviewing for. I even threw in some ideas for how I can help achieve the goals they have already revealed will be part of the position’s success metrics. But as I left the interview, I had a sense of dread. One of those, “You did your best, but your best wasn’t good enough” feelings that I’ve only had a couple of other times in interviews. And my intuition was always spot on, in retrospect.

So, as I sit here tonight, I’m thinking back to a line in one of my favorite things I’ve ever written: 

But even in the Bay Area’s highly publicized culture of “Done is better than perfect,” jobseekers never get a second chance to make a first impression. We aren’t given feedback. We can’t take what we’ve learned and make things better. The process ignores exactly what we are supposed to be good at: progress.

I try to approach these interviews like user problems. I get as much information as I can about why the role is open, what the success metrics for the position are, and ask for the types of things potential collaborators are looking for in their new college. Then, I try to see what examples I have in my work history that I can show which will help them decide I'm the exact person who can bring a solution to their specific problem. But I wish we would look more broadly at how people can help. 

Nobody should be hiring based on what people have already done. We should be hiring on the promise of what we can do together. The work I’ve done came to life thanks to a specific confluence of events, in a particular moment, at the hands of a unique combination of people and their ideas. We’re never going to be able to recreate that. And the solutions I’m showing in my portfolio would be different if even just one of those elements were changed. So, why aren’t we better at assessing and quantifying whether we can create beautiful solutions with someone, other than looking at their past work? I honestly have no idea. And I’m obviously frustrated by that. 

One thing I’m sure of, though, is that I — thankfully — have a few more interviews lined up for later this week, and I’m again refining my portfolio deck for them, one more time. I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied with having to present past work to represent future promise, but unless and until that changes, I’ll keep playing the game. Right up until I land my next gig, that is. Then, I hope to take this curmudgeonly perspective about how we hire and suggest changing it in each and every place I’m lucky to be a part of from now on.

See you tomorrow?

17 February 2023

Last night, I shared part of the thinking I was going to use for a presentation today to a potential new team. I’ll cut to the chase: I didn’t get the gig. As we move through my post-Google life, I hope you don’t mind me doing some retrospective evaluations of how things went and what I could or should have done better. It may help any other job seekers. I know it will help me. So, let’s talk about today for a bit.

One thing that has become clear in just this first week of interviewing is that nobody has any idea about how long these positions will exist. That holds true for the people I’m talking to and for the roles I’m actually interviewing for. Above all else, there’s this unsettling sense of looming foreboding. Nobody wants to make any promises. People are placing caveats on everything. There’s no sense of knowing. And it’s compounding all the anxiety I already feel as I’m looking to help my next team. 

When I am having trouble adequately articulating my emotions — which can happen often — I tend to go for similes or metaphors or analogies instead. In an effort to better describe what this week of conversations and interviewing has been like, let me try one on you now. Essentially, I feel unmoored. Like a small boat that’s seaworthy, but has seen some action in its day, coasting around looking for a safe place to tie up for a little while. There’s not a lot of urgency yet, because although the seas are rough, it’s nothing this sturdy vessel hasn’t seen before. Except that this time, it just feels different. The waves are the same heights as others which have been successfully navigated before, but there’s just something a touch more menacing in them tonight. Is it that the water’s warmer? Are we just further from shore? Or is the ship just ragged enough these days to ramp up the uncertainty of its survival. I have no idea. It could be one of these things. Maybe a combination of all of them? Or —gawdforbid — some other, unknown vexation just on the other side of the next wave. All I know is that, for now, the “any port in a storm” adage is making a lot of sense. But there’s even a problem with trying to find a port. And that has to do with using the right navigational charts. This is where we’re going to change the analogy considerably, so please forgive the sudden switch to dry land. 

The conversations I’ve had with potential teams have been enlightening, but, ultimately, not fruitful. I’ve done my best, and prepped well, but I’ve come up short over and over so far. Now, that’s not to say I haven’t accomplished what I set out to do. In fact, it’s the opposite. A couple of times this week, I’ve presented well, made all the points I intended, and tightly tied my skills and accomplishments to the job description. But the teams still went with another candidate. It’s been hard to take, but I have to understand that maybe my best either 1) isn’t as good as I think it is, or 2) wasn’t better than another candidate who had more of what they were looking for. To return to the land of explanation, it feels like I got an invitation to an amazing party, which included the time, place, menu, and guest list, but forgot to include the fact that it was a costumed affair. There just seems to be a disconnect between what teams are saying they need and what they actually want after hearing from the available candidates. Again, it’s just been really hard to swallow. But I understand that’s how job searching goes. It just downright sucks. And I’m sorry for everyone having to go through this right now. Both the candidates and the teams looking for talent. 

I know nothing is guaranteed. And I acknowledge the vast amounts of privilege we have for me to take my time and find just the right role. Not everyone has that luxury, and I am grateful and appreciative to have it. I can’t help but think there’s a better way, though. I just don’t have any suggestions for it right now. Mainly because after licking my wounds in this post tonight, tomorrow, sift through relevant new job postings, survey my network again, and write a handful more cover letters. Then, I head back out to sea to find a welcoming berth for this seasoned vessel. 

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?