My adventure at Google lasted four years. I spent six years in corporate-land after graduating from university. I left Google in the summer of 2018 — without having a plan for the future. But that’s a terribly stupid thing to do, you might say. Why would I do that? That’s another story.
For the first time since 2012, I was unemployed. And I realized that nobody understood the value of a stable job more than somebody without a stable job. Fortunately however, I wasn’t desperate. I spent and consumed very little so any savings I had wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
I didn’t actively search for my next job at first. A few other things happened. I got married, among other things. But after a few months, I caved in to the pressure and started looking for a job. The market here in Vancouver wasn’t nearly as good as it was in Seattle or the Bay Area… but it couldn’t be too bad, right? After all, Vancouver is one of Canada’s top tech hubs, right?
An overture
Let’s just say this experience taught me otherwise.
Before I got my very first job at Amazon, I only needed to send my resume to a few companies before Amazon reached out. Perhaps that could be considered a stroke of luck. But I did have some factors working in my favor. For one thing, I had a website and a fairly substantial (for a student) personal project I had built from scratch, which at the very least made me stand out from the other students. And at the time in summer 2012, Amazon had a major effort to hire new grads — and I was exactly that.
Now fast forward to 2019. I was sending out resumes left and right, waiting for any sort of response. One day an acquaintance reached out and told me they knew a director at a certain company, and could set up an interview. I said sure, let’s do it. I had nothing else to do while waiting.
This was for a software engineering position, but I didn’t care enough to ask more about it. I was willing to entertain the idea of taking whatever offer they’d give me, because let’s face it — who in Vancouver is going to pay me as much as Google? And I was fairly certain that this was going to be just a formality, that they would hire me simply because of my experience.
So I made my way to their office. It was just one hour-long interview with two interviewers in the room, and some systems design questions. It seemed to me like they were also treating this as a formality, given that they read through my resume. Unfortunately, we didn’t communicate very well during the interview, but afterwards the director himself wanted to talk to me so I figured there was still a chance.
The first thing the director asked me was, why? Why did I want this job? And I had no choice but to be honest about it. There was no good reason. I was just here because of circumstance, because someone referred me here. And I wanted the job because it was better than being unemployed (now now, I did not actually say that). I do seem to recall him mentioning the word “passion” in there somewhere. Whatever the context was, there was no passion. Then he let me go.
The interviewing grind — from the other side
As for the resumes I sent out to various companies, very few of them even reached back to me for an interview. Some of them had me do a phone screen, then never responded after that. For some of them I ended up going onsite and going through their full interview loops. But all of my encounters had one thing in common: I was never able to get an offer.
It made no sense. Back in 2012, I was a fresh new grad with no experience. Now I’d gained six years of experience at big-name companies. Then why was it harder to land an interview, let alone get an offer? I went through the full interview loops of at least 10 companies without a single offer, and who knows how many more phone screens and other miscellaneous interviews.
And I wasn’t applying to the big-shot senior level positions, either. Here I was, applying to junior- and mid-level jobs that paid a measly fraction of what Google paid me. I was willing to start from wherever the bottom was, learn things from a fresh perspective, and work my way to where the others were.
I speculate that they expected someone who spent four years at Google to be much better than how I’d presented myself, especially at system design and architecture. Then one might ask, why wasn’t I simply… better? That’s a story for another time.
Parting thoughts
Eventually I did find a job, but not in the way I expected. My job search started around January of 2019 and ended around August or September. Did I learn anything? Nope! You know the saying that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?” Yeah, it’s totally not true. There was really nothing to learn in this case. If you get hired, you got a job. And if you didn’t get hired, you didn’t get a job.
Well… if there was anything at all to salvage from this experience, it would be this. The fact that you worked at Google or any other big-name company doesn’t mean anything. The corollary being, that if you get hired by Google or any other big-name company, that is not proof of anything except for the fact that you got hired. The people who work there are all just ordinary people, no “more” — i.e. no different from — than the general software engineering population.
I suppose that’s reassuring for prospective job seekers. Because even if you don’t think you are “Google material,” nothing is stopping you from going ahead and sending your resume to every company you come across. Who knows what will happen?