After 6 months at Googamaz...book

Some intense months later, I’m back with fresh ideas and stories to share. Secrets follow. Well, not really, but I’ve put everything in a list to make it easier to digest.

Once the commercials are over, the movie begins: the interview and then the orientation don’t prepare you for the environment you’ll be swimming in when the daily work starts. On my path to enlightenment I realized that the kitchen staff, the people who cook that good food for you three times a day, are likely evaluated on par with the people they feed. At the end of the day, nobody gets a free meal.

I also found out that the photos floating around the internet, with colorful interiors, pool tables, arcades and pinball machines straight out of the ’80s, are real. I also learned that an unhealthy balance between productivity and time spent having fun in the games room or napping in the library will land you on a PIP (performance improvement plan) before your first anniversary. Failing it is obviously your ticket out, but some people choose to leave on their own terms. For the company the outcome is the same, though: a (possibly lifetime) “no rehire” flag in your file.

From the outside, people leave or are let go, and it’s impossible to tell the two apart. There seem to be “sweet spots” for leaving at certain intervals, like just before the 6-month mark for people who’d rather not pay too much tax to some country or, who knows, maybe it’s just a quick divorce. Another sweet spot seems to be around 1 year, when the first batch of shares vests and the payout can be significant. Seeing many people stay beyond their 5th year or so is encouraging, though.

Changing my position on my LinkedIn profile made the profile-visits counter drop by more than 30%, while InMails and connection requests went from nearly daily to maybe once every few weeks. Simply put, very few companies can offer compensation like the big ones everybody talks about. The big companies also run their own recruiting pipelines and don’t work with third parties.

On a side note, some recruiters simply cold-mail every candidate in their internal database who matches certain keywords, without checking whether those people are still on the market for that kind of role. I don’t have figures to tell whether that strategy actually works for them, but I now ignore everything from recruiters with less than 5 years of experience, no exceptions.

The path from “wow, I’m so lucky” to “what the *** did I get myself into” is short, really short. In the first month or so you might consider writing angry emails to everyone who didn’t believe in you or refused to give you a position you badly wanted at some point in your career. Of course you don’t, because you realize that people, starting with you, are constantly evolving and, by definition, focused on their own needs. What others can put on the table isn’t always their top priority.

I’m kidding: you don’t do it because the honeymoon ends faster than you’d like, and you find yourself in a different country, in an environment governed by different rules, away from familiar places and intimately close to a very demanding workplace. If your family is with you, the challenge is multiplied, as they may struggle to adjust to local life too. This is actually the leading cause of people leaving companies in their first year after relocating to another country, or even across the ocean.

At some point the roots start to grow and the new environment no longer feels menacing. You start meeting people and doing work that seems to make other people’s lives easier. The prospect of your first formal performance review ending in a PIP slowly fades. Maybe the whole future of humanity no longer looks so grim after all, and neither does the outlook for your career.