Valleywag
Ionut Alex Chitu compiled a selection of farewell notes from departed Googlers. Nostalgic and longwinded, they're full of remembrances of free food and something called respect for engineers. Here's the good stuff — Googlers on why Googlers go. Four-word version: To be in charge.
- "In my career, I've always swung between the big and the small and it's time for another shift." — Jeff Veen, Design Manager
- "These days, it seems like a lot of the true innovations are made at small startups, which have the benefit of being orders of magnitude times more agile and efficient than a large company will ever be." — DigitalHobbit
- "I wasn't looking for a new job, but a great opportunity fell in my lap that I felt I had to take." — Jess Lee, Google Maps Project Manager
- "The one thing I began to miss at Google as it grows was the ability to be a generalist within the company. In a startup, it is easy and encouraged for folks to wear multiple hats. I used to buy data centers and fiber, manage an acquisition, work on Google Talk, pitch an access partner, receive a dignitary and give a speech about the future of media all in the same week. As a company gets bigger, inevitably, it begins to organize itself vertically and employees are pushed to specialize." — Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives
- "The challenge of creating something new in a space that's so young and evolving was too great to pass up." — Vanessa Fox, Google Webmaster Central Product Manager
- "I'm ready to do something new with a smaller group of people." — Nelson Minar, who created Google's first APIs
(Photo by Sebastian Bergmann)
Comments
how about stock vest dates and amount of stock liquidated on this little punch list of people inching up the hierarchy of needs.
That's unusually cold actually ...considering these emails go out to thousands. Haven't heard of this yet, but jeez... how unfortunate for the people who can't jump to other companies to be reminded by others are leaving.
That reminds me of something I can be doing at work.
Not that I'm leaving now, but I should have one ready.
Is CCing the CEO tacky?
"receive a dignitary" - a bit of boasting going on here I wonder..
What "dignitaries" did you receive Chris - Al Gore, the papa of the Internet.
When I quit, I didn't get all hurr-hurr on the mailing lists because nobody cares.
Ted: These goodbye messages were posted on the specific people's blogs, not as 'hurr-hurr' messages on the mailing lists. Is that okay by you? :-)
Often times people who write code from scratch are not the best people to maintain or even enhance it. If these people can't find brand new projects within the company it is best for both them and the company to part ways.
In fact it is bad for a company to encourage such people to stick around just wasting their talents in order to have bragging rights (Microsoft).
You can always (1) invite them back when a new project comes up, (2) buy their company if they've produced another winner, (3) get a new genius out of college since good programmers/designers are never quite as irreplaceable as they think they are.
It's seems for the talk of having to become specialized, these people seem to be whining, ironically, because they didn't feel special anymore.
I've worked with enough egineers in the past to know that one of their biggest peeves is dealing with the reality of running a sustainably profitable company. That, and their natural fear of suits and women puts them at odds with the company when it comes time to actually make businesses out of their r&d.
@macbeach: And pray that the person who originally wrote the code didn't leave it a complete mess that will take a year for the next guy to figure out before they can even begin to do anything with it.
smart people can be a big frikkin pain in the a$$, way more trouble than they're worth. Hasn't anybody read 'Brave New World'? You need your Betas and Gammas and even your Epsilons to keep the machinery running. And let's face it, a lot of the machinery running is very very far from rocket science.
Ted Dziuba left for the blogging.
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