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It was a hard lesson for me to learn in the past: if you care wildly more than the people around you -- so much that you work late into the night while your grandmother is dying and your coworkers are pounding drinks with their counterparts at a competitor -- you'll just end up really hurt and frustrated and they'll all think that you are the problem.

The author seems like the kind of person that I'd love to do a 3-person startup with. We'd be in an environment where working late into the night is valuable sometimes, and because all of us would be doing that he'd have no reason to be resentful. Hopefully he gets into a group like that before the corporate life trains him to preserve his sanity by not caring so much.

and they'll all think that you are the problem.

Agreed.

The thing is that often they are right. It's almost literally crazy to me that he wouldn't just try to reschedule the meeting and that he would work when his grandma was dying. It's not working long hours that's a problem but in my experience it often correlates with people who don't work well in a team (which this guy seems like a perfect example of).

I love working with people who “don’t work well in a team”. There’s something beautiful about these crazies. They make amazing stuff if you just have the wits to lead them.

I do sort of see that, but there's another side to that coin.

This dude, and many people I've met similar to him, takes people on their word and acts accordingly. He might be a bad fit for an environment where this is not respected, but I'd argue this is not a sign of 'not working well in a team'. Rather, it's a sign of him taking people on their word and finding it difficult to work on a team where this is not respected.

I imagine there are plenty of teams, in companies big and small, that do respect these kinds of things. Or at least do so begrudgingly.

My personal experience is that any work environment that does not manage to handle these 'your word is your word' type situations, even if badly, is a horrible place and destined to fail (barring some exceptional situation where they can get away with it).

Outliers like this particular person are a kind of anchor-point. Perhaps it's okay, even necessary, that they don't quite thrive in certain stages of a company. But when they actively flee the ship, it's a horribly sign.

Or have a problem ;)

you'll just end up really hurt and frustrated and they'll all think that you are the problem.

This so much this.

It’s so hard to find a tribe of passionate driven people who care crazy amounts about their vision and purpose.

His criticisms come off as seriously naive and green if he was expecting to upend the design practice of a behemoth tech company with many competing business units and products, each with their own leaders, legacy code dependencies, and teams of designers who would poke holes in his design decisions from a UX perspective (e.g. didn't test designs with users, just made it up) and see him as a 'graphic designer' who is a glorified pixel pusher and lacks a fundamental understanding of the field of HCI and user centered design.

This is clearly evident from when he mentioned his outrage that he:

"Never would’ve imagined that I was joining a team of 50+ designers where a bunch of them had never designed before.

And I was “evaluated” at about their level? These weren’t interns, these were designers in their very first roles ever...at Google."

From any UX design professional's perspective, he comes into their world, lacking any background in UX or basic understanding of user centered design methods, and just does the visual design portion of the work, not the actual hard work that goes into understanding human behavior, being curious and testing hypotheses and validating designs with quantitative and qualitative data via UX research methods.

Dude needs to check his ego in my opinion, design is a team sport and anyone can mock up random dribble worthy interfaces in an afternoon and think they deserve the title of designer then diss others who have a 4 year degree in fields related to understanding human behavior, not just art or graphic design (although art degrees are good if you solely focus on visual design due to color theory, typography, understanding design aesthetics, design critiquing etc.)

tl;dr

UI designer ≠ UX designer

Whoops, I misspelled *dribbble

He did get into an env like that, later on in the thread he mentions he started shift.com which just raised 140m.

Seriously. When Jim schedules a meeting for 9am the next day, just tell him that you need more time than that. Instead, this guy goes home and works through the night so he can prove Jim wrong.

Way too much ego tied up in petty disagreements here.

Agreed. The thing it took me a long time to realise about stuff like that is that you're not winning by breaking your neck to get something done for an unrealistic deadline, they are!

I finally read the story after reading this comment and some of the other ones, and this undersells how nuts it is.

> Anyhow, my wholesale redesign of all of Jim’s work was obviously making him feel bad.

> One day, he came up to me totally flustered in one of the micro-kitchens. He said “People aren’t liking these icons.” I said, “Oh, ok, let me know who and I’ll collect their feedback and we can make them better.”

...

> Me: “OK, no worries man. Would it make you feel better if I put something together that explains my decision making and then you and whomever else can punch holes in it, and give me direct feedback?”

> Jim: “Yeah, ok, sounds good. I’ll put something on the calendar.”

> 9am the next morning. A dick move.

> I went home and got to work.

> In the early evening I got a call from my dad. My grandmother’s health took a turn for the worst. They weren’t sure she’d make it past the evening.

> I couldn’t grieve. I needed to make this happen. These two designers were beloved by Greg. I had to win them over or they’d screw everything up for me. Everything I’d worked for could come crashing down due to their pettiness.

Like, holy hell. Jim is a _peer_. Nobody asked Morgan to do this work, Morgan volunteered to do it. And he decided to work through a major life event in the off hours for something that didn't come from anyone above him in the hierarchy? And then to blow the other guy up when he reschedules the meeting? Wow.

> It sucks that the author's grandmother died and that he felt the need to work through the night while that happened, but it's unfair to take that out on your colleagues.

It's unfair to take that out on your colleagues, but it is fair to blame it on management and the culture they set. Some people are going to be more politically protected than others for reasons that aren't strongly related to the value they add to the business and able to get away with things others aren't, and if you don't counteract that, you'll both get inefficient results (either they're doing something they shouldn't, or other people don't feel empowered to do something they should) and also cause a loss to morale and trust.

Setting clear (if mechanical) rules about things that would otherwise turn into "the politically connected can do this, the rest of you can't" is absolutely the responsibility of management. Saying to people up front that they should always feel free to take time off or cancel meetings for personal emergencies and the company trusts their judgment (if that is in fact the policy) and making sure people act like it's true - or making sure people show up and have extremely good excuses when they don't, if that's the policy - is management's job.

totally agree. Things like "Let’s call him Greg because his real name is just as vanilla." are just petty. Maybe it is because I have a name I hate to explain to everyone but jabs at the name your parents gave you aren't cool.

There is a lot of ascribing negative motives to other people's words and behaviors when other explanations seem possible from the description he gave to the situation.

Assuming the motives of others, especially when they’re always negative, is a huge red flag.

He wouldn't be the first designer to pick apart everyday things and question them.

But you have to remember that he was told he'd get to work on Chrome but was then assigned to G+. You have to be extremely laid-back and financially secure to roll with that punch and not put the rest of the company under a microscope (even criticizing petty culture-identity labels like 'nooglers' builds up resentment).

How is changing projects a punch? Haven't been longtime in a permanent position but there never was a project guaranteed during recruiting, only the skills and type of work.

Even if the project was guaranteed, things happen. Roll with it. Building resentment you are just hurting yourself.

Fuck, posts like these piss me off so much. There are so many candidates who would give their arm and leg to work at Google.

Heck, if i didn't have a startup I would have been happy to work even on Orkut at Google.

Bait and switch, where they try to convince you to take a lowball offer because you'll work on prestigious projects like Chrome, then turn around and put you on G+ is most definitely a punch. Just because it happens (regularly) doesn't mean you should just roll over and take it.

There could be inaccuracies here, it's a twitter rant after all, but as presented, that would demoralize a lot of people. You don't have to force your own happiness just because some people aren't getting their dream job at a dream company.

Then reject the job offer? Would you take up the job if the salary was reduced on day one?

Some devs would roll with lower salary, some with different projects. You can still call the shots instead of going ahead and whinging publically

>Would you take up the job if the salary was reduced on day one?

I'd certainly tell people on as many public forums as possible instead of just letting someone walk all over me and also see if I could get anyone with influence to reverse the decision.

Do I sit and take it? Hell no. And you shouldn't either because you should have more self-respect.

Is this your definition of "walking all over you"? How much of a bubble is silicon valley?

I have worked in the biggest bank in Australia where subcontractors were siphoning away the source codes and customer data via mobile hotspots. I blew the whistle to data security and got fired in return. Company later paid me huge chunk of money in return for silence.

Sometimes you just gotta walk away to better deals. Life is unfair more so if you have a big ego.

Since you’re sharing, how did you get from being fired to being offered payment for silence? You got terminated and a day/week/month later the bank reached out to you offering money just in case, or they fired you and approached them asking for “cautionary” compensation, or something in between? Not trying to make a moral judgement, I’m wondering how these escenarios play out in real life

Guessing the sequence of fired->get lawyer->send letter->settlement+non-disclosure is pretty common.

Similar to what the commenter below said except I had one more step of federal court intervening and forcing the settlement

>Is this your definition of "walking all over you"? How much of a bubble is silicon valley?

Yeah it is, but I don't live in the valley.

I mean, your example fits my definition too. I just have a much lower threshold that I tolerate apparently.

But lets wait for someone else to come by with a more impactful story than yours and we can reset the goal posts.

Sure. Also there was a guy complaining that free food in Google was an execuse to keep employees longer in office to make them work.

Breaking promises is considered unethical in most cultures, not just in silicon valley. Maybe "walking all over you" is an overstatement, but an egregious thing that has happened to you doesn't make what happened to the OP less bad.

I've heard this is standard behavior for google - completely disregarding what an applicant wants to work on and putting them instead on a project chosen by the hiring committee. Considering that the range of different projects where you may end up is enormous, I agree that it sucks.

You've heard that, huh?

HC doesn't pick your job, they decide whether or not to hire you. Hence the name. At Google it's typically trivially simple to switch teams (this article notwithstanding), so teams don't recruit and hire independently like happens in many companies.

So after a hire is approved, they have to be matched up with a team. Teams decide whether or not a hire is appropriate for their team, and candidate decides whether or not team is appropriate for their interests.

If you're approved for hire but you don't like the team you're paired with, say "I'd prefer to work on X", and if X is hiring and their hiring manager thinks you're a good fit, then you can go there instead. That route is more complicated because recruiters specialize in a given area, but the whole point is for you to like your job.

Exactly the same at Ibm, eBay and jp Morgan when I worked there. There were even programs to let you try out new projects before you commit to them.

All it took was the dev to say that he preferred working on a specific project. Some teams even have further internal hiring processes from the talent pool.

I am not even sure OP knows that team switching was possible and how internal recruiting works for large organizations

It is not that internal transfers are impossible, but they are never as easy as advertised. Yes, many companies have formal processes for them, but stars still have to align just right both at your old team and the new one.

> All it took was the dev to say that he preferred working on a specific project. Some teams even have further internal hiring processes from the talent pool.

I'm not sure if I read that correctly, but don't these two sentences contradict each other? Of course some positions will be more coveted than others, so additional processes are necessary to choose from all the people interested in the position. But it means that just saying "I prefer to work on X" is not nearly enough to transfer (of course it isn't).

Good, I assume you have first-hand knowledge of Google's hiring practices.

So, what number of teams can a typical candidate choose from? Compared to the total number of teams hiring? I guess the typical scenario is that a few teams express interest and then you can choose one of them, which is not much different from just "congratulations, this is your new team".

> At Google it's typically trivially simple to switch teams

How simple is trivially simple? Does the new team have to have sufficient budget/a vacancy? What kind of selection process is there if you are not the only one who wants to transfer to that team? What about your old team? What do you do with your responsibilities at the current project? Can you transfer immediately after you've been hired?

>So, what number of teams can a typical candidate choose from? Compared to the total number of teams hiring? I guess the typical scenario is that a few teams express interest and then you can choose one of them, which is not much different from just "congratulations, this is your new team".

Depends on a variety of factors (candidate skills, season, other people, what projects are being worked on etc.). I've seen everything from between 1, and like 8-10.

>How simple is trivially simple?

There's an internal hiring board that people post openings on. You can apply. AFAIK, the manager can pick between people. Basically all of your other questions come down to "does the hiring manager want to allow it".

>What do you do with your responsibilities at the current project?

Depends, I'd hope people handle it like reasonable humans. In my case at least, I told my manager I was interested in transferring out in the next couple months, and he told me to stick around a bit longer so that he could make sure I got promoted. I ended up not transferring out as my work got more interesting.

In general, its easier to transfer with the blessing of your current manager, but from what I've seen its not required. And there are probably long tail cases where transferring is difficult, or people do unethical things, but I'm not directly familiar with any, and I don't think they're the norm. So for most cases, transferring is trivial.

Edit: And actually, if you read the entire story (more was posted on twitter after this article went up), he was able to transfer off of the team with almost no issues, to a team he found much more interesting, but instead left to go to Dropbox. The whole transferring this was literally a nonissue once he actually tried to do it.

> Would you take up the job if the salary was reduced on day one?

This is a labor law violation, because it's obvious, even to government regulators, that it's unfair to the employee. I would hope everybody would object to labor law violations on their first day of work.

It's tempting to think of Google as a monolithic entity that "has a will" and "says things" and "makes promises," but in fact what happened was probably more like...

He didn't get the Chrome job.

His resume was "kept on file" as they say.

Months later a different job came up with a totally different team of people, and someone on that team remembered him and recommended him. (Slap of ingratitude to that guy I guess. Just one of many things this guy got wrong.)

I've been part of recruiting processes before where even when the applicant is applying for a specific role, if there's a better fit (as described here by the G+ manager wanting this guy), then that's usually the offer that is made. Given the time gap, the lack of details, and the author's admission to taking it and waiting, I don't think this was a surprise.

Employees like these quickly wear you down if you are leading then. I am surprised Google is not doing a personality test before recruiting.

When I was a recruiter for ibm I always made sure to check if the potential was an asshole or not before going ahead with tech. Talent can always be learned by those willing. Attitude is permanent.

You've got that backwards. Attitude can be adjusted, but only if the person is willing. Talent can't be learned--at least not by most people, and not on the timescale of an actual job to be performed.

Talent only even begins to matter when you're at levels roughly 4-5 standard deviations away from the mean.

This. In college I was a lightweight rower. Despite there being thousands of people in that sport at the college level, in most years there are 0 to 1 kids with enough genetic talent to be unbeatable by everyone else who just works hard.

Then how do police forces argue that intelligence is a legitimate criteria in hiring?

How do they measure intelligence? Whatever test they give, I promise it doesn't reveal intelligence, only aptitude, knowledge, and whatever latent biases the exam preparer had.

You are entitled to your opinion but in my life as tech recruiter or even for my startup my priority has always been culture fit aka don't be an asshole. The rest is negotiable.

Completely agree! Because even if you have one amazingly talented person, if they're morale-killing and toxic to work with, any gains from their talent is negated by loss of productivity and the drama they bring to the rest of the team (as well as turnover they inspire because people just can't stand to work with them). I'd much rather work with someone pleasant, funny and smart who is trainable and tries hard but maybe is less talented than a talented jerk.

Hm strangely I find the opposite to be true. I actually think personality is really hard to change but if you aren't good at something you can be trained.

Without the right attitude though it's hard to train someone.

I totally agree. I don't think the idea of "talent" is meaningful. For the most part, at least with software design, you can learn all this over time, but it requires you to have the right attitude (i.e. a growth mindset).

You can tell when people don't have the right attitude because they stop trying to learn things or listen to outside perspectives. That's the attitude that causes people stop learning and stop growing.

how would you check? what was your test?

I don't think it's controversial, post was unprofessional and came across very entitled and immature. It's bad for his career imho.

I find not being able to show up to your job, especially a 9am meeting you scheduled, because you were hungover to be irresponsible and unprofessional.

As long as it doesn't interfere with his work it doesn't seem necessary to judge why he wasn't there (people miss small parts of the day for different hobbies all the time). If all he needed to do was reschedule one non-urgent meeting it doesn't seem like it really matters.

Yep. Seems like a smart guy, but overwhelmed with bitterness. Also a fair amount of irony from someone complaining about fair treatment, like:

"Let’s call him Greg because his real name is just as vanilla"

The author of this article sounds insufferable to work with. Sounds like the google team all couldn't stand working with him, so while they didn't specifically fire him, they orchestrated to force him out so he would resign. After reading his self-indulgent, whiny, bitter grandstanding tirade, can't say I blame them.

Also shows a complete lack of introspection or self awareness that he'd post and promote this drivel and think it makes him look GOOD! Lol. Career suicide imo. If I was considering hiring him and googled him and came across this writing, I'd nope out so fast.

In my opinion it makes both him and Google look really bad.

I'd describe him as the second designer I'd hire. Possibly invaluable to the endeavor, but not the single source of truth.

If anyone except maybe my skip-manager scheduled a meeting for 9am, I'd say "Sorry I don't get in before 10".

"If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."

- Raylan Givens

Plenty of organizations breed assholes as an evolutionary process because they thrive more than better behaving people.

So since the author calls out many people he enjoyed working with at Google, this quote isn't all that relevant.

I agree the writing style, it's not constructive. That said, I think the main point is that his manager and some of his colleagues ganged up on him because they felt threatened, and that resulted in him being let go.

That does indicate a problem for Google if true. This is often the slow death people talk about when big company culture turns like this.

This is made stronger by the fact Google+ failed, and they're shutting it down. If i was an exec at Google I'd totally take this as a retrospective data point, and I'd explore to see how much of this attitude existed within the Plus org, if it was prevalent, it could have had a role in the failure of Plus.

>That said, I think the main point is that his manager and some of his colleagues ganged up on him because they felt threatened, and that resulted in him being let go.

>That does indicate a problem for Google if true.

I mean, if his writing is a reflection of how he behaves then why is this a problem for Google? Getting rid of toxic people in a company is a positive and not a negative.

This is assuming they are actually toxic and not a scapegoat. Can't tell that from a single post as it usually takes more than one instance for a person to blow a gasket just like that. (unless there is something really wrong)

People on bad projects like scapegoats.

Ganging up on one guy, especially new young upstart, is a sign of a dysfunctional team too.

He doesn't come across as toxic. At worst, he's not a team player. That can be a problem, but I'd argue not being able to tolerate or channel these individuals definitely is a portend of a bad corporate culture.

Totally agree.

Sounds like conflict management is not handled very well by anyone in these situations.The author certainly could have handled it better, and "Greg" should have handled it way better.

Very disappointing to hear, but at the same time these kinds of conflict are usually local and only affect a few individuals, so it is probably not very fair to describe the whole project and exec team as operating in this fashion.

Management above Greg should have seen through Gregs behavior a long time ago and acted on it.

People like Greg are poison to a workplace, IMHO.

Naw, people that think they are always right and don't recognize other talented people are the poison.

I agree that management above Greg could have possibly identified his behavior and acted on it, but it might be reaching a bit to expect them to have done so... sometimes these individuals can be hard to identify and root out (for example I doubt that Greg would ever be so mean in front of his bosses).

Good on the author to bring this kind of stuff into the open though so that it hopefully happens less in the future. At least something went right lol!

Assuming "management above greg" are competent (not a stretch in a successful company) then they likely measure Greg on important things like effectiveness and retention. Not being mean in front of his bosses has little to do with that.