After 5 wonderful years at Google, I feel it’s the right time to leave and hunt for my next adventure.
Google is good enough, I think if I stay, I will continue a stable job with great work life balance and a decent salary. But it’s just not going to fit my growth plan anymore. It’s such a huge company, which is something that attracted me as I’m a new grad but disengage me as I’m getting senior. I’ll describe more later in detail.
I joined Google 5 years ago as a new grad. It was like a dream come true to be a UX designer at Google!
I still remember I was as excited as a kid, wandering around every corner of the Google campus.
In my opinion, it’s a great place for designers who just start their career to learn things like:
How to turn ideas into reality.
How to consider design thoroughly, such as accessibility, internalization.
How to deliver designs that are going to scale.
Some people say that in big companies, everyone is like a screw, working on a tiny part in a pipeline. I have to admit that it is sort of true, but it depends on how you see it.
It’s true because Google is huge with around 140k full-time employees. So it is a tremendous machine with thousands of pieces running harmoniously together. That’s why it’s almost impossible for a single person ( well, not high-level leadership) to act like an engine.
Compared to the influence of this machine on the world, what an individual does feel small. But everyone focuses on the delicacy of their own parts. This is especially shown on teams that work on legacy products. For example, when I worked on the design of Schedule send at Gmail, I have to be super rigorous in designing the button and make decisions with data back-up, just because it’s a button that might affect the ‘Send’ button, which is one of the most critical and frequently pressed buttons in Gmail. And Gmail itself has 2 billion active users.
So from one angle, this design is small, and you might feel it’s overkill to be so cautious even to a button. While from another angle, a bad decision on the design could actually influence billions of users, especially for work-related scenarios.
I think the huge machine metaphors probably also well-explained another thing, process. The way to run an organization with 100 people could be totally different than the one with 10 people. The goals of process are to
- make sure stakeholders are onboard
- avoid gaps in order to deliver things with less risks
- potentially be more efficient because things are less chaotic (this is ironic because another outcome of the process is slow down.
This actually leads to the 3rd thing I want to talk about: Speed
Although the whole process is still iterative, it’s not ‘lean’ anymore, every function has its own process. Yet there is another process — align cross-functionally. I mean, this not only includes PM, Engineer, Design, it can also involve Legal, Privacy, Security, to name a few. All the review, approval, alignment take time, although your ideas get more robust over and over, the innovation shrinks and the original target day delays. I’m sure this not only happens in big companies, but this situation is more obvious than smaller companies.
Don’t get me wrong, you still get to ship new things, but in a slower way. It’s not rare to see the projects you worked on shipped after you left the old teams for 1–3 years, especially for designers. You have to get used to delayed gratification. And your impact can be hard to measure since it takes time to turn designs into reality in products.
Despite the reality, still a large amount of people want to join Google. This leads to 2 things 1. There are many talented people in the company (this is good since you can easily find role model to learn from) 2. Overqualified people work on smaller things.
Scope, process and speed, these are the typical characteristics of big companies like Google. They are not good or bad, they are just essential for running a big company like this. And the standardization actually teaches you how to do things in the right ways. In my case, I get to:
- Broaden my horizon on knowing how to get a big machine running
- Understand what are important for products at different stages, through working on a few well-known products, e.g. Google Assistant, Gmail, Google Chat, Google Keep
- Enrich my design methodology library to deal with different challenges
- Learn from many talented people, not only designers.
These are the treasures that I gained from big companies in the early stage of my career.
However, my growth mindset keeps on telling me, although I will keep on learning if I stay at Google, it’s just not going to be fast enough because I’m so used to it. Even though there are so many different teams to try, I can imagine ultimately it’ll fall into the same.
I’m looking for something different yet I can still leverage my strengths. I believe things I learned from Google can bring value to smaller companies, especially those in a fast growing stage.
So, after 2 months of exploration, I joined a fin-tech startup, though it IPOed recently, it’s still at the fast growing stage. In the next article I will tell you my journey on finding the right opportunities and how did my decision process look like.
It’s never an easy decision to leave Google and pursue something new.
“Step out of your comfort zone”
“Try something different”
“Never slow down learning”
“You need a breakthrough”
These short but powerful voices in my heart become the inner-motivation for me to find my next adventure. I know it’s the time.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think Google is a great company. If you let me go back to 5 years ago, I will make the same decision.
My last day at Google is actually when the office opened again after being locked down for more than 1 years due to the pandemic. I went back to the office to grab my stuff.
I sat at my old desk, grabbed my favorite matcha latte with a cute rabbit on it from the coffee shop, feeling like getting back to home. So many great things have happened here. So many great people I’ve met here.
Goodby Google, you will always hold a special place in my heart. ❤❤
