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In mid-November, I started a new job. I’m now back at Google, doing technical writing (for internal-facing documentation), but as a contractor rather than an employee, at 20% lower pay and with fewer benefits.

The opportunity arrived unexpectedly, from a recruiter on LinkedIn. For various reasons, I thought for a while that it might be a scam; even after I was sure it wasn’t, I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to take it. But eventually I changed my mind.

I had three main layers of resistance to taking the job:

1. GenAI. There’s a possibility that I might at some point have to work on something that involves generative AI.

   I am hugely opposed to generative AI in most contexts (I still plan to write in more detail about why, but I haven’t done that yet). Quite a lot of computer industry jobs at the moment involve working on or with genAI in one way or another, and I’ve been refraining from even applying for those jobs.

   And Google, too, appears to be in a “must add genAI to everything!” mode, strongly reminiscent (to me) of the “must add Social to everything!” mode that led the company into the huge mistake of Google+, which the company spent an enormous amount of money and energy on before eventually shutting it down and walking away from it.

   But for this particular job, it sounded to me like the main work that I would be doing wouldn’t have anything to do with genAI. And indeed, a month into the job, nothing that I’m working on so far is related to genAI. So this part is OK.

2. Google. Google has been doing more and more ethically dubious stuff over the past few years, and I’m not sure how comfortable I am working for them.

   For 18+ years, I stayed there because (a) at the company’s core, imo, it was still focused on making the world a better place; and (b) my overall compensation was far better than I was likely to get anywhere else; and (c) my colleagues were great.

   But over time, the company has continued to make large-scale moral decisions that I’m unhappy about. It has been doing bad things to workers more often (than previously) since around 2019, including firing or otherwise pressuring workers who’ve spoken up about problems. It has been increasingly focused on short-term profit and less on long-term good for the past several years. It is involved in Project Nimbus and other potential human rights abuses.

   One of the reasons that I wasn’t super distraught about getting laid off last year was that I had been growing increasingly uncertain that the company was a place I wanted to be, though I probably wouldn’t have left on my own for at least a while longer.

   This new job doesn’t change that. The company continues to behave badly in various ways. (For example: After the election, Sundar (the CEO) tweeted congratulations to Trump, along with an entirely gratuitous election map showing which states he had won.)

   And as a contractor, I’m a second-class citizen, and the way that Google treats contractors has never been great and has gotten increasingly bad over the past several years.

   But there are a couple of nice things about going back, such as:

   • I’ve regained access to all of my old files and data and email, which I suddenly lost access to when I was laid off. And I had used some of those as sort of auxiliary memory, so it felt like losing access to some of my past. For example, I had a document listing all 21 of my managers over the years (on average, I changed managers every ten months); losing access to that meant I couldn't remember who some of them had been, or could remember only their first names. For another example, I used to maintain a spreadsheet showing the growth in the number of Google employees over time; I carefully used only externally available data sources (mostly Google’s reports to investors), so I could have posted it publicly, but with the layoff I lost access to it. So it’s nice to have access to all of that again.

   • I’ve now rejoined the Alphabet Workers Union, the union for employees and contractors at Google (and other Alphabet companies).

   • I’m reporting to someone who I know and like, and who likes and respects me.

   • My main project is something that’s a reasonably good fit for my skills and interests.

3. Working at all. I had been actively looking for and applying to jobs for the previous few months, but one reason that I hadn’t been putting a huge amount of effort into that is that I would rather just not have a day job. I spent a year and a half without one after the layoff, and it was really nice.

   But last time I talked with my financial advisor (which was several years ago; I now have a followup scheduled for January), I didn’t have enough money to retire yet. And I still haven’t reached the goal amount of money that she recommended for retirement at the time.

   In the medium term, I’m fine; I could probably live off of my current resources for the next 20-30 years. But running out of money in my 70s or 80s would not be ideal, assuming I live that long.

   I don’t love the fact that my pay in in this new job is significantly lower than my base salary at Google (not even counting the non-salary compensation); I’m now doing roughly the same kind of work I was doing before, at substantially lower cost to Google and substantially less income for me. I probably ought to have tried negotiating for a higher salary, but even then Google would be getting a good financial deal. And more generally, I strongly disapprove of their practice of laying off employees and then bringing them back as contractors at lower compensation for the same work.

   But then again, the salary is a whole lot higher than for most of the other jobs that recruiters on LinkedIn have contacted me about.

   And I’m an employee of the contract agency, so I do get some benefits, such as health insurance (much better than Covered California, at a much lower cost), and paid holidays, and gradually accrued paid vacation. And I’m salaried instead of hourly, so I don’t need to carefully track my hours. And I can work fully remotely—that’s very important to me, and most of the other jobs I’ve seen in the past few months have been hybrid.

   And the job was pretty much handed to me. I didn’t need to go looking for it, and I didn’t need to interview for it. That’s worth quite a bit to me.

   Also, it keeps the gap in my résumé from being as long as it otherwise would’ve been, next time I apply for a job.

So, with all of that in mind, I somewhat reluctantly took the job.

It took me a while to be up for posting about it. Partly because I’m kind of embarrassed about going back to Google; I’m still uncertain that working for them is an ethical choice. Partly because I wanted to wait until things were a little settled. Partly just because I’ve been not getting along well with social media lately. Partly because my blog keeps getting hacked. But I figured it was time I finally posted.

It’s a one-year contract, but it probably has a high chance of getting renewed at the end of that time, if I want to renew it. (But they or I can end the job at any time. I have no loyalty to either Google or the contract agency.)