two years and counting...

People usually write this type of messages when they are leaving Google, either because they want to, in which case they sound phony and over the top, or because they are forced to, in which case they are bitter and incomplete. I want to try something different and write what I really think of working at Google while working here.
Today is my second Google birthday, i.e. today 2 years ago I started working here which puts me in a kind of weird place since I'm certainly not a noogler anymore but neither an old timer. I know for a fact that is fair to say I'm in the middle of two worlds.
On the one side there is the long time Googlers who have been here on some cases right from the start and know everything and everyone and on the other are the nooglers who are full of excitement and have yet to find their place. But right in the middle are the rest of us who have the illusion of control and think we have it figured out :)

I drank the kool-aid

First of let me start with a disclaimer, I do like Google, I loved Google even before I joined Google, I used a bunch of our products for work and pleasure and I since I'm here this love has steadily increased. I do believe that Google is having a positive impact in the world and I'm proud to to be part of it. Yes we are not perfect and ,while we try (really hard) not to, we sometimes fail to do the best thing we can do.

Obviously this is not an official position and I can only speak for myself when I say the things I say but please also let me be clear that there is no personal or company agenda behind these post. I just want to take a snapshot of how I feel and as with every snapshot if others can enjoy it is good if they think is bad and have something to say about it is better.

The right decision for the wrong reasons

So starting from the top, when I joined Google, I was in a really weird place in my life. I had just left a company I build from nothing and that had been my life for the last six years, and I had no idea what I wanted to do next but I did knew that I wanted to be in a place where I could grow and learn. To do that one of the most important things is to be around better people who know more than you do. So the natural move was towards the big tech companies.  So I did some interviews and eventually an offer crossed my path and I took it, thinking "well some time in Google can't hurt a resume right?".

Boy was I wrong ... this place has totally ruined me. I now have a personal bar so high, regarding what I will need from a new job, that I realize that I could not do a remotely satisfying job if I was to put in charge of my own compensation package. Lesson 1: The guy in charge of compensation in this place is smarter than me. 

No, I'm not talking about the strongly publicized perks of Google (though all of them are nice) and no, I don't have a big fat salary, not to be pretentious but I'm pretty sure I could get more money if that was my goal, and finally no, I don't think that the rest of the companies out there are doing it wrong or that this is as good as it gets. What I'm really talking about is the general attitude towards compensation Google has: It feels fair and I'm confident is financially sound (again smarter people than me doing that).  

The "team"

One of the hard parts of being at Google, is explaining to people some of the terms we throw around casually in one conversation or another but may have not precise definition, like googley or the pletora of acronyms we use. Oddly enough when talking about "the team" it always is a qualified term, either explicitly or implicitly. At any given point you are always in a huge number of "teams". My official role is being a CSE (customer solutions engineer if you must know) so in my case you can find a partial list of the teams I can refer to as "the team"; play a game and put each between "the" and "team" or play a drinking game and take a shot for each "the" you forget.

• Mexico
• Latam
• CSE Latam
• Global CSE
• Americas
• SP-latam  
• Sales
• Engineering
• SSPO
• west wing
• TGIT
• "we are trying to find a good name" 
• Starterkit
• YouTube 
• Google
• ...

There are probably much more than those, including each of the project I'm into, and all the  combinations you can think of. Also as in any launch email, those that were forgot, not because they are not important, but because we really need to send this. The weird part of it is that in all of them you find a place you feel part of, and there will eventually be an all-hands meeting you will get invited to. 

Is all about attitude

One of the unexpected things I found and I love is the extremely open culture (towards the inside) which allows to have very approachable people. You can reach out to most people within the company for help and they will generally try to help you, most won't be bothered by org charts or bureaucracy and if you take others into consideration most of them will consider you too. 
I think Google is full of really talented people and most of them are at least smart, well intended and passionate ... about something. I do not have to come to the office, I like it. I do have internet, food and a big monitor at home guess what is it that is not there.

6 things I hate about you

Obviously there are things I don't like about being here and most of them are probably things I don't like about me, projecting on others, but in the interest of balance and full disclosure here are a few:

• People that feel better than others. Either internally or even worst with people outside the company. I really don't like when someone talk trash about others in a non-constructive way. This happens everywhere but when I see some Googler doing this, it feels wrong. 
• You have to watch what you say. People have this tendency to blew out of proportion everything Google (or any googler for that matter) says and it sucks because there is so much you say that actually does not have anything to do with Google that sometimes is just annoying to always keep you mouth connected to you brain ;)
• You are always using a crappy version of our products. We are famous for testing our products internally before releasing to the general public, which sounds great from the outside but what nobody tells you is that as a result the internal version is almost always crappier than the external. 
• You lost track of what has been launched, and because you have to watch what you say, you end up keeping you mouth shut about an awesome feature for months after it was launched. 
• The nagging emails. When you take so much action based on what people think and feel you end up asking a lot of people for a lot of feedback a lot of times, the most unimaginative solution is email which is not that bad the first time you get the email, but not the second nor the third time nor the fifth time asking you to please answer the survey that you answer when the first email arrived 3 weeks ago because "we are only at 83% of completion... ".
• The re-orgs. Not too much to say I guess that is just another thing we are good at and we like to do it a lot ... most of them are for the best, but I sometimes it feels like driving in circles.

The future

I want to be here for a while, there I've said it. I like lots of things and most of what I don't like I can change. Though I've always feel that wherever I am I'll be there for good, I now know that this is not actually true. I hope this place keeps challenging me to be a better person and a better professional, I hope we keep growing and bringing more awesome people than the ones we lose.