My little adventure at Microsoft lasted for fifteen months. By the time I left, I had an offer from Google in hand. I was excited. For a week or so I hung out in my little Bellevue apartment before returning home to Vancouver. The United States was comfortable and had everything I needed… yet it felt like I had no roots there. All my work visas were on a temporary and conditional basis. I was living by myself, paying out the nose for rent. I knew almost nobody. I didn’t buy a car. In hindsight, not getting a car was a terrible mistake for someone in my situation. But that’s a whole ’nother topic.
Revisiting my past
A quick recap. At Amazon, my title was Software Development Engineer, which meant I worked on Real Software. We coded in Java and we built some very generic microservices which talked to other microservices, manipulating and shuffling around data, and having an on-call rotation to make sure it’s up 99.99… percent of the time, for some number of nines. At Microsoft, I became a Software Development Engineer in Test, which meant that I no longer worked on Real Software and was in the realm of Testing (the pay was higher though, and there were other reasons). We used C# and all that fun stuff to write test automation libraries for a very large piece of Real Software.
Now at Google, my title was Software Engineer in Test, which was the same thing as Microsoft — but different I swear, because they do a thing where they unofficially put “and Infrastructure” at the end so that the abbreviation becomes SETI, like the outer-spacey stuff. By the time I joined Google, or perhaps several months into the job, Microsoft had eliminated the “Test” designation… but Google kept it. The pay was much more generous than Microsoft, and included the famous “Noogler” stock grant vesting over four years. And there was free food. This was part of the standard suite of perks in Silicon Valley.
Before I knew it, I was on a plane to San Francisco. Actually, it was San Jose — the true heart of Silicon Valley. Google had set me up with an apartment in San Jose for the first month, one of those large apartment complexes in a suburb with no distinguishing features. Sterile, utilitarian, designed for tech people. There was also a Google shuttle station right outside the complex — Google operated a shuttle bus service that served many parts of the Bay Area. Of course, it was not by accident that they put me here. At least it was comfortable if nothing else. But enough of me channeling Tolkien and going on about trivial stuff! I was there to do a job, experience Googleyness, and find out what Silicon Valley was all about.
Fish out of water
Once again, I had no say in what I was going to be working on. I was placed in a testing team under the Google Search organization. We were responsible for maintaining infrastructure for testing Google Search, specifically the user-facing portion of it. This was when Search on Android, with the voice search capability, was a relatively new thing. It served an important purpose, that was for sure. But as far as I can tell, there was nothing “special” about this team, nothing that made it stand out. It was driven mostly by the needs of the Search development team, where all the Software Engineers (SWEs) were, and — as I slowly learned — all the fun was happening.
There were some new projects which were in planning stages, and one of the other engineers got placed in a particularly good one — which meant it was highly visible to higher-ups — which got him promoted rather quickly. I got a different project, which was not quite as visible. And there was already someone else working on it, practically duplicating my work in a slightly different way. That made it difficult for me to elbow my way into the action. Thus, I never really felt like an integral part of the team. There were usual day-to-day dev and maintenance duties, which I got the hang of, but obviously that doesn’t make an engineer stand out.
A change of surroundings
Eventually I got bored of the grind, and looked for a way out. But this time, I wanted to stay within Google. I had enough of hopping around different companies for the time being. The official rule was that I had to stay in the team for twelve months before I could transfer to a different one. At twelve months, I did just that. I started looking for teams to join.
After a lot of searching through the internal jobs website, I found one — not the ideal one, but beggars can’t be choosers. This team was responsible for the localization (L10N) tech infrastructure at Google. I had lunch with the manager and a couple of engineers on the team. My future prospects sounded interesting, and we got along pretty well, and the best part? I would become a Software Engineer working on Real Software! So that was good enough for me. We started the process. I did a few short interviews. Was deemed good enough to be a SWE. Got my title officially changed. Joined the team, and that was that. On to my new adventure!
Even more déjà vu?
Shortly after I made my move, one of my colleagues from the previous team asked me about the transfer process. He was no doubt a talented individual, and had been in the team for a few years but never got promoted. Though he never displayed any outward signs of dissatisfaction while I was there, I got some sneaking suspicions…