Today is my last day at Google

It's been a while.

I joined Google in 2016 at the mothership in Mountain View, California. I'd just left 10 years at NASA, and was taking a leap into the unknown. I'd never worked for a large American company before, and Google seemed more than a little Bay Area culty at the time.

I started as a Level 6 staff engineer, something I had absolutely no idea the definition for, and nobody really ever explained it. I stepped into a tech lead position in the Gin team – Google has lots of internal names for systems and products that are meaningless outside the company, so I should say that this has absolutely nothing to do with the Golang Gin web framework! It was actually an insider risk/counterintelligence auditing system inteded to do things like ferret out foreign spies, employees doing things they shouldn't, etc. It worked pretty well.

A few months in, my manager suggested that maybe Gin could do well to become an external product. This led me to doing quite a bit of travel, visiting other Google sites in Chicago, London and Zurich, and many meetings with legal and VPs persuading them that this could work. At the time, Cloud and (what became known later as) Workspace were blocked on some very large deals because customers were concerned that Google employees might be able to access their data. Of course, if they did, Gin would most likely spot that, but those customers weren't happy to take that on trust. So I was pushed to move to Chicago, build out a team, and to externalize Gin. This wasn't straightforward – the data rate was scarily huge, and though our internal analysts could handle the data, it would be incomprehensible to outsiders. The solution became known as Access Transparency, which my team delivered in an astonishingly short time scale. I heard that it unlocked a lot of business once it rolled out. (Full disclosure: the Access Approval system came later, and wasn't my project)

At that time, Trump's first term was happening, and as a queer immigrant I was getting more and more scared. I was checking the news more than once a day to see whether I needed to put an escape plan into effect. I had several, made a little simpler because Chicago is very close to the Canadian border, but I ended up taking a less dramatic approach than bailing unprepared. My mother passed away just before I moved to Chicago, and my dad's health was failing. They lived on the Spanish Balearic island Mallorca at the time, which was an easy flight from Zurich. I asked my upper management, and was able to relocate to Google Zurich.

I liked Zurich a lot. I still do, to be honest, even though I left for Ireland a couple of years ago. Whilst there, I initially stayed in Security & Privacy, working in the Data Governance team for about 18 months. A big reorg killed my project, so I moved over to Cloud Site Reliability Engineering, and became a manager. A team had grown a bit too big, and was being split into two, so I ended up picking up half of the new team, which became known as the Zurich side of the Open Source Analytics SRE team. We ran a few systems, most notably Google's managed Hadoop-on-Cloud product, Dataproc. A year later, another reorg rolled our team's responsibilites back into the development team, and after a bit of finagling and wheeler dealing the majority of the old team went with me to YouTube, becoming the Zurich Trust & Safety SRE team.

Then COVID happened. Things got weird, for everyone. I was doing whatever I could to support my team, even organizing some basic cooking lessons via Google Meet when it became apparent that some of them had never cooked for themselves and this was hard for them as they were having to depend on delivered groceries.

While I was in Zurich I was diagnosed with a couple of autoimmune things, and was strongly advised to avoid catching viruses (not just COVID). Of course, I did manage to catch the damned thing just as everything shut down, before testing was widely available. Medical services were swamped, so people were being told not to show up unless they really were dying, so I just basically holed up for about 3 weeks. It sucked, but I was OK, thankfully no long-COVID symptoms. My spouse lost their genetic father to the virus soon afterwards. But it did seem to me that Google would probably return to office in a way that might be safe(ish) for most people, but not me. I asked to stay working from home, and was told I could, but I had to give up my management job. I was quite sad about that, but it was what it was and there wasn't much I could do about it. I brought on one of my team members as my replacement, and went back to a tech lead position.

This lasted a few months. I took on an uber-tech-lead (UTL) position in YouTube SRE, but I really didn't get any traction. UTL is a difficult job – you are essentially tech leading tech leads, which critically depends on support from upper management. I really liked YouTube and the people, but I'd describe it as a bit of a supertanker – once it's going it's going, and changing direction even slightly is very difficult. An opportinity came up to move over to another team that was doing what these days would probably be called observability research – basically data science on logs, in order to detect and diagnose problems in large scale systems. This was a lot of fun – I got to throw everything from traditional statistical analysis to digital signal processing to various kinds of machine learning (genetic algorithms as well as neural networks) at huge amounts of log data.

About half way through that project I moved to Ireland. My dad had passed away the previous year, I was starting to think forwards to post-Google life, and I realised that staying in Switzerland probably wasn't going to work. Though I loved the country, financially it didn't add up. Cost of living, particularly for property, was out of reach, even on a fat salary. Moving to Ireland resulted in a large pay cut because of the way Google operates payroll relative to local norms, but it worked out to be a wash. With even an apartment where I was living being the 1m+ CHF price bracket, I just couldn't see how I'd be able to retire once I hit retirement age.

In Ireland, I was able to buy a house outright, free and clear, no mortgage, for what would have barely been a downpayment in Switzerland. I bought an old post office in a small village in the west of Ireland, still intact from the day it closed in 2009, with a 5 bedroom apartment above and several outbuildings and a fairly large garden.

The research project came to an end a bit over a year ago (it had always been time-limited), so I moved over to the Turnups org (internally known as the Turnips, for probably obvious reasons). This is the bit of Cloud that 'turns up' clusters to cope with expansion, much of which around AI compute capability recently.

About a year ago, I hit a point where I realised that there was some trans-related stuff that I'd been putting off for decades, and I really needed to deal with. With the wind blowing in a scary direction for trans people everywhere, passing has become a significant safety issue. I'd already had facial surgery in 2001 with its pioneer Dr Doug Ousterhout in San Francisco, but there were some less than ideal outcomes from the original surgery, and time and gravity had taken its toll. So early this year I took extended medical leave and went through several surgeries to deal with that, with Facialteam in Spain. I also started working with a voice therapist. It's been a long road, but I'm happy with the results.

Being on extended medical leave gave me a lot of time to think, and I came to the realisation that staying long term at Google probably wasn't the right thing to do. The company doesn't feel like the company I joined – its values are different, and it seems increasingly likely to acquiesce to pressure from the Trump administration. I can easily see an executive order being issued forcing all companies with US government contracts (which of course includes Google, particularly Google Cloud) to fire trans workers worldwide. Even in Ireland, in the EU, where something like that would be flat out illegal, it felt like a career death sentence, so I started to look more seriously about what should happen next.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm anything but passive, so I wasn't keen on just waiting for the axe to fall, however good my salary might have been. So I decided to leave the company on my own terms.

Yes, I have plans. But I'm not announcing them until I'm no longer an employee. Watch this space!