How it started.
On November 13, 2006, I drove to Mountain View, CA, signed a lot of forms, made a bunch of benefit elections, got my photo taken, collected a laptop, put on a funny hat, and started working for a new employer. On July 5, 2024, after 6,444 days, 10 different physical locations in the Bay Area (not counting my WFH locations during the pandemic), 12 managers, and an awful lot of documentation written, I left that employer, the Google division of Alphabet.
Leaving Google left me both melancholy and relieved, weirdly for some of the same reasons: Google was an amazing place to work for most of my time there, a place where you could speak freely to whomever you wanted, up to and including the founders and senior VPs; where you felt that management treated the employees like real people whose opinions were valuable and to be welcomed; where management was incredibly generous about money, travel, and other perks; where the food was astonishing; where the technology was fantastic; where people were generally idealistic and thought that Google could do real good in the world with its technology.
Well, things changed a lot in the last few years. The layoffs, from the big layoffs of January, 2023, through the constant trickle of layoffs since then, left everyone in a state of fear that they might be next, especially because the severance pay got worse and worse. The founders and Eric Schmidt left; many of the most trusted people in the company left (I'm looking at you, Laszlo Bock and Alan Eustace, in particular). The internal culture deteriorated, with lots of moderation of mailing lists, masquerading as a way to protect people and keep us thinking about work. The ethical AI team was laid off by someone who had been regarded as one of the good guys. Women in upper management left. Bean counters took over: did you know that a company with $80 billion/year in profit has gotten stingy with its travel budget? and doesn't have enough technical writers?
So, I'm melancholy about leaving what was a great to good job for nearly 18 years, and I'm melancholy about not working with my colleagues (who were mostly great!), but more melancholy about the ways the company changed in that time. And I'm relieved to have left, because of those changes, and because I won't be around to see how LLM and AI change technical writing.
I still like technical writing, which suited me very well for twenty-eight years, but at the same time, I have less interest than I used to in learning about new technology and documenting it. I worked on some amazing technology, such as the
Google Search Appliance (RIP), many Google Cloud products, and
optical circuit switching. The OCS project had the most amazing technology I worked on documenting; I honestly believed that Google would never go public about its use of optical circuit switches, but my link is to the very public paper that the technical wizards published a couple of years back.
What's ahead for me? Well, I effectively retired from Danzan Ryu jujitsu at the beginning of 2022. I started practicing in 1982, but was off the mat for six years in the middle somewhere, owing to work and family stuff and after having left my previous school. I temporarily shut Open Door Jujitsu at the start of the pandemic, then cautiously re-opened in late 2021, shut down again because of the first Omicron variant. I never re-opened. In the 18 months or so of closure, I lost more physical ability than I'd lost during six years off the mat during an earlier hiatus. My school was never big enough to break even and after ten years of struggling to find students, it seemed like time to throw in the towel.
So on my agenda is finding a Tai Chi teacher, preferably Chen style, and picking up my practice of that style. And possibly making music again in some form: singing in a chorus or restarting on the flute or starting a new instrument. And maybe taking some classes. And more travel and working in my garden.
But the biggest thing is surely that I have much more time for music writing, so I am going to be doing a lot more reviewing and feature writing. And I have a lot of time for get-out-the-vote work for the November elections. Those are my two priorities for the next few months.
