Archive for Work

Stressful but productive day

Today was kind of emotionally exhausting, but productive. (No advice, please.) Background: Although Google laid me off back in January, I’m still officially an employee until March 31—just an employee who has no responsibilities and no access to anything. (US law requires them to give two months’ notice for this kind of thing, but doesn’t […]

The saga of the bocce balls

Way back in 2011 or so, I bought two sets of pro-quality bocce balls, paid for by work. My group at work at the time was starting to get into occasionally playing bocce, and I thought it would be nice to have a couple of good sets. So I ordered them and expensed them. Over […]

Presenting in absentia

For our annual tech writer conference at work, I gave a talk about the sixteen-year history of our developer docs style guide; I created the original version of the guide in 2005. The conference had the presenters prerecord their talks this year, so I recorded mine before I went on leave. The people running the […]

Productive but stressful

Today was complicated. (Wrote this post late Wednesday night, posted it Thursday morning. In this post, today means Wednesday.) On the one hand, I was super anxious. Higher anxiety levels than I’ve had in a long time. I wouldn’t call it a panic attack exactly, but very very stressful. On the other hand—partly because of […]

Googleversary

As of today, I’ve been employed by Google for fifteen years. As I’ve written on past anniversaries, I had never previously stayed at any one company for more than five years. And when I started at Google, it wasn’t a very good fit. (For example, at the time, I liked to refer to the company […]