More about my Google contract job
In my previous post, I talked about the main reason that I quit from my contract job at Google. In this post, I’ll talk more about why I wasn’t loving the job even before that decision.
Most of my main projects that I worked on as a Google employee didn’t involve work that I loved. They were fine, but they mostly weren’t deeply meaningful or exciting for me. Instead, here are the things that I loved most about the job, during my 18+ years there as an employee:
- The orientation toward making the world a better place, at all levels of the company.
- My colleagues (both the members of the specific teams I was on, and the other people at the company), the vast majority of whom were wonderful. Thoughtful, kind, compassionate, considerate, often social-justice-oriented, helpful, interested in learning and helping each other learn.
- The overall compensation, which was quite a bit higher than I could make anywhere else. (A high base salary, plus an annual bonus, plus a huge amount of money in stock options and (later) stock grants, plus excellent health insurance, plus little things like reimbursement for home internet, plus access to Google facilities (including good food) if I went to campus, plus discounts on things like Apple hardware, plus plus plus.)
- The parts of the job that involved making things better for people and helping improve infrastructure. Such as:
- The style guide work, which was occasionally frustrating but overall hugely rewarding.
- Creating and giving presentations to colleagues about how to use various tools, such as regular expressions and (in the early days) Dreamweaver.
- One-on-one helping people out, including teaching them how to use various tools, giving them feedback on their work, providing advice (when requested) for junior tech writers and editors, and sometimes just listening sympathetically.
- Managing mailing lists.
- Running meetings, including the weekly style guide meetings and the monthly cross-group meetings for tech writers.
- Taking notes in meetings.
- Writing up emails about how to do various things and sending those out to colleagues.
- Providing feedback and bug reports and feature requests for all kinds of tools and systems.
But in my recent contract job at Google:
- The company is shifting rightward/Trumpward and moving away from DEI; it’s much less focused on making the world better than it used to be.
Because I was a contractor, I had very little contact with most of the other people at Google. I wasn’t allowed to attend team meetings for the tech writing team that I was affiliated with. I wasn’t allowed to join mailing lists that weren’t directly related to my work. (I did stay in a couple of internal chat rooms and attend the abovementioned monthly meeting, but I suspect that I wasn’t supposed to do either of those things. Though nobody told me I couldn’t.) And I couldn’t view internal forums like the meme system or the internal version of Blogger.
(Google has always treated contractors poorly, but its treatment of them has gotten steadily worse over the years, because it wants to make sure that contractors don’t start thinking of themselves as Google employees and thus start suing the company to get it to treat them better.)
- The pay was 20% lower than my base salary as an employee, and though I did get some benefits from the contract agency (reasonably good health insurance, paid holidays, the ability to accrue paid vacation), I didn’t get most of the benefits that I had had at Google.
- I didn’t get to do most of the kinds of work that I had previously most enjoyed doing. My main project in this contract job was infrastructural, and was a reasonably good fit with my skills and interests, so that was good. And I did get to help a colleague learn some tools. But aside from that: I wasn’t allowed to work on the style guide, I wasn’t allowed to do organizational stuff like managing mailing lists or meetings, I didn’t have a context in which I could present things to colleagues, etc etc.
So almost none of what I liked about being a Google employee was true in my contract position. The contract position just wasn’t a very enjoyable job for me. So I might not have stayed regardless of the DEI stuff. But the DEI stuff made the decision easier.
(I recognize that most people don’t have the privilege of getting to only work at jobs that they enjoy. I wish we all had that.)
…Last Wednesday, the day when the Google manager I worked with reported me for not working fast enough, I coincidentally also received email letting me know about two open employee positions: one for a technical writer and one for a technical editor, both in a Google Cloud tech writing group that consisted almost entirely of people who I knew and liked. If I had heard about those positions a month earlier, I might’ve been tempted to apply for them.
I might not have applied (because of all the reasons not to work for Google, and because I suspect that both positions would’ve required me to be in the office in person multiple days a week), but I might have, because all but the first of the above issues would’ve been addressed by having an employee job instead of a contractor job.
But by the time I saw those listings, I had already made the decision that I was done with Google.
