game over

some thoughts on layoffs and life

Well, I got laid off, which is maybe a gift? I saw lots of good people come and go, held on and earned top ratings. It always felt bad and I’ll be happier on the other side. But it’s pretty scary! I’ve never lost a job before, I wish it didn’t blow up like this, and I wish I could say it was my choice. Appreciate your thoughts as I imagine life after Google. 

Aw, friend. All these layoffs! What the hell. When I first heard how it went down at Google—mass firings via middle-of-the-night email, “see ya suckers!”—Larry Page’s big dumb grin popped into my mind with haunting/pristine clarity. Due to my old job, which I’ll explain in a second, I have all these catchphrases of his permanently lodged in my psyche like Jenny Holzer statements projected on a building in all caps. And one of these is GOOGLE SHOULD BE LIKE A FAMILY.

[interluding here, sorry….we’re going for a ride on a rickety rollercoaster, folks!] There was a period of a few months during my time on the Comms team in like 2011 when it was my job to note down everything Larry Page said. He had just become the CEO (this was a short stint—he would step down a year or two later after getting diagnosed with vocal paralysis and basically never spoke publicly again, so you tell ME what kind of illuminati little mermaid soul-trade went down there?!), and my ultimate boss, the head of PR, was trying to figure out what he wanted to say, to feel out his “vibe,“ knowing that the quickest way to a powerful man’s heart is through (writing) his talking points. I took this on with the utmost seriousness, which is funny in retrospect; I chose a font (“Courier New”) that gave it the look of an official dossier, like something clacked out in a back room at Mi5. But it was also funny in the present, back then, because he really never said anything. All his “money” lines were painfully cringe, like “our vision is computers doing more of the hard stuff so humans can do what they do best: learning, living, and loving!” Over and over he told a story about how he read a biography of Nikola Tesla as a tween and cried—he really emphasized the crying bit—because Tesla died poor, which taught him the all-important life lesson “commercialize your inventions or you’ll die poor.” Still I assumed he was a genius and had the highest, purest hopes that once Google unleashed the full spectrum of human potential, it would solve all the world’s “highest-impact” problems—he had another one-liner about how curing cancer was simply too small a problem for Google, so they had set their sights on the true moonshot: CURING DEATH.

But the “Google should be like a family” company philosophy stuff was the frontispiece of Larry’s vision at that time. He shined while riffing on this theme….he had a whole story about how his grandfather, a Michigan autoworker, had a lead pipe that he used to protect himself against the bosses (generational trauma really “connects”), and no one at his company would ever feel like that, it was going to be all trust, respect, meaningful work, “bringing your whole self to the office” and so on. So it was surprising and surreal to watch the parade of layoff posts go by on LinkedIn, each sob story more Dickensian than the last: the husband/wife duo with a newborn, both laid off on parental leave, a woman with a baby fighting for their life in the NICU, a guy on an H1B visa who happened to be on vacation when he got laid off so now he can’t come back into the US and has to ask his friends to sell his car and things. It’s not exactly giving “family”?! I assume the decisionmakers think that giving people slightly more than the legally required amount of severance is fair recompense for 1/ firing them totally unnecessarily and 2/ denying them the opportunity to say goodbye in a dignified way (especially considering most Googlers have a totally fragmented sense of self/vocation/purpose after years of being inculcated with I AM GOOGLE, GOOGLE IS ME, GIVE THYSELF TO G). And they’re wrong about that. The people turning the knobs at the top have zero humanity or heart. It’s all a game, and the rules are arbitrary/bad.

It makes you wonder why Google is so willing to let go (lil’ layoff humor there!) of the progressive-corporate-utopia mythos they were carefully cultivating over so many years and executive briefing docs. I’ve come to the view that organizational culture in tech is about normative control, strategic influence over employees’ hearts and minds in order to serve the company’s interests/goals. Larry Page said as much all those years ago! They weren’t creating these crazy workplaces with ballpits (??) for the fun of it, or because of some genuine belief that corporations could or should be a site of self-actualization. They did it because that’s how they attracted, retained, and got the most out of people in those freewheeling, creative, high-growth, get-in-loser-we’re-curing-death years. The goals are different now (chase ChatGPT’s tail? maintain search advertising monopoly?), the world’s changed, too, and new norms and forms of employee control are needed. They’re not gonna be good ones: one of the more depressing developments of the past couple years at Google is the establishment of an Internal Community Management team, a bunch of hall monitors who rove email lists and Memegen like Dolores Umbridge’s Inquisitorial Squad, tattling when people say something too “politically charged,” or post something too challenging on the Q&A page when Henry Kissinger comes for a “fireside chat.” My guess is that management has decided that fear, insecurity, and having workers be regularly confronted with their insignificance vis-a-vis the force and weight of the institution are more effective “cultural values” at the moment. Not very “Googley,” innit?

As for your life after Google: of course it’s better, or it will be better when you’ve healed what feels broken and sat miserably in the occasional paroxysm of shame/grief/anger. Not to get all Pema Chodron, but what you are offered here, now, is nothing less than the gift to define your worth/work on your own terms. I think a place like Google (all FAANG? Or sorry, it’s MAMA now) makes it increeeeedibly hard to do that. There’s just way too much stress and politicking, and I would assume the culture of self-promotion and the theatrics of selling your impact (that’s totally divorced from, like, real-world impact) is only going to intensify in this post-layoffs, am-I-next era. It might just be impossible to make a meaningful life inside a mega-corporation? Is this obvious to everyone? There’s some smart people in the Discord who have figured out how to “make it work in the Matrix” via a sense of true vocation in their technical skills and a keen facility with using their middle management status to make things better for people around them, to speak truth to power in effective and non-self-immolating ways, etc. That sounds admirable and yet very hard to imagine when I think about my old department at YouTube which, seemingly as a rule, elevated the most odious corporate operators every performance cycle and punished the “real ones.” Be a real one! It’s better that way.

On a parting note, I’ll leave you with the hard truths of my Google/post-Google journey: Google was never a family, it was always just a corporation, and if you never commercialize your inventions, you’ll die poor.

solidarity/peace/love,

claire