Managing Up

tech support investigates a legendary ladder-climber

Dear Tech Support,

Almost 10 years in the game and my dignity, just like my corp access, has been revoked. I am now but petrified human firewood tossed atop the Big Tech layoff pyre for The Shareholder Event of the Year. Oh how they dance, TS! Oh how they dance! Won’t lie. The sense of injustice I feel could power one of those small European states that no one's ever quite sure is a country. The rage flows through me but that’s not why I’m here. As we were both once huddled in the cathedral of performativity that is [redacted] marketing I feel it appropriate to talk about optics. The schism between the real and the delusional. Namely, what does it mean to be Googley in 2024? When I entered the company I gulped the Kool-Aid, wore swag IN PUBLIC and felt a frankly embarrassing degree of superiority when strangers asked me what I did for a living. When I started as a bright-eyed Mountain View serf and you were the Bard of Google (btw you ever lie awake at night thinking about how your namesake AI assistant was dubbed thus just to PISS YOU OFF???) ideals like psychological safety, innovation and autonomy seemed bedrock. Business reporting on early G invariably included tropes like the open feedback culture where entry-level nobodies could openly wild out on execs with impunity, how 20% projects liberated Googlers to marry passion with impact on their own terms and where a militant user-first philosophy meant products were more often than not useful and vaguely magical. Let’s not forget Don’t Be Evil (hahaha or should I say muhahaha!).

Look around now and it’s like the difference between Gossip Girl (The CW) and Gossip Girl (HBO Max). On paper they’re the same thing but one is beloved, iconic and charming and the other is just this sad/visionless cash grab orchestrated by out of touch boomers obsessed with gen z despite literally knowing nothing about them and populated by a cast acutely aware that this whole thing suuuuuucks but the bag beckons so fuck it? The Google of now is built on fear, compliance and an unwavering dedication to checks notes ah yes, shareholder value. Psych safety? Never knew her. Autonomy? Get back in your box, peasant! Ethics? Umm how much Israeli state funded propaganda do you want surfaced at the top of legitimate news searches? Innovation? How many engineers does it take to make a tiktok clone that isn’t constantly trying to red pill you?

If a company’s stated values should reflect its demonstrated behavior, what then, are the new rules of Googleyness? That is, what behavior is actually rewarded at a company that is fear-based, top-down, rigid, inefficient, plodding, callous, unethical, nepotistic and performative? One in which employee leveling feels directly proportional to one’s own ineptitude, cruelty and narcissism? Googleyness 2.0 being some version of Girlboss, Gatekeep, Gaslight feels like a convenient start (plus alliteration!) but I’ll leave it to you to outline the new rules of Googleyness so that future Googlers can stop helping each other and start helping themselves - all the way to the top baby! 

Sincerely, Human Firewood

Firewood, my friend. I’m so sorry for your loss of employment. It’s not cool, man! It. Is. Not. Cool. Or maybe it is, a little (I’m lifting my forefinger a millimeter above my thumb). I’m thinking of you “clocking out” for the last time and frankly it’s giving air…it’s giving freedom…it’s giving inner child recovery starts right here right now! I prefer it out here, myself, the righteous outsider flapping my gums without a care, no longer the cynical insider rapidly decomposing from the noxious combo of frustration and fear. That’s no way to live, man!* (*except for the money and the health insurance, which Tech Support does not wish to diminish as important co-factors for living.) I just watched the Normal People BBC series with a bout of stomach flu and while it’s not about corporate life per se, it washes the outsider archetype with a bit (lot) of sex and fun. We’re not like the others, are we Connell? I want to whisper in the ear of every freak on the street…Society’s total gobshite, innit? 

All right, I’m undocking the dingy to take us out. In response to your “brief” (which stands alone! you clearly graduated summa cum laude from the Tech Support School of Power Analysis and Being a Snarky Little Bitch ;), I am thrilled to offer up a character sketch of Magda, my old manager, the orchestrator of my ouster, whose handspring up the ranks of Giggles Inc. the past decade must be proof of what The Org (shudder) values. Every now and again someone will text me “from the inside” being like “Magda’s at it again…” and we’ll go back and forth for a while (“classiccccc Magda,” “hell is real!,” etc), but have I ever probed how and why it (she) works? Gather ‘round, children….

(I have to note that somewhere out there my husband is reading this and howling “oh god that random woman whose name you have not missed an opportunity to drag through the mud!” He’s got a point there. Magda’s a real person, not a public figure, with no ability to offer her side of things. But I have some points too: 1/ that’s not her real name, 2/ she has the full weight and protection of one of the biggest corporations in the world, the palliative effects of which are better than xanax, 3/ at the end of the day, isn’t the story of Magda really the story of ME? the journey I’ve been on to untangle my experiences/foibles/complexes in the once-and-for-all pursuit of dignity and personal authority in work, in life? and especially 4/ she freaking started it! Sorry Shane, we’re going full Magda today…)

I was put on Magda’s team in 2014, just a few months into my tenure in YouTube Marketing–it was the kind of department where haphazard reorgs and shift-arounds were always happening. Her title was Global Lead of CRM (“customer relationship management;” shudder count: 2), but her fiefdom was tiny: she managed a weekly, algorithmically-generated email that went out to people who’d created a YouTube account and probably forgot to un-check a box. I never once saw this email and eventually it just went away. The more exciting bit in her portfolio was what I’d been tasked with managing: YouTube’s social media presence, which was at that point a handful of tweets and Facebook posts, written and posted by an agency at arm’s length. “There’s a lot of opportunity theah,” she said when we met for lunch in San Bruno for the first time (I’m trying to draw out her blurry British accent, one of her main character attributes), because “YouTube is the biggest brand in the wuhld on sewshul.” What did that mean? I didn’t ask. She was tall and gangly with loud blonde highlights and enormous sunglasses–an English country girl gone California–but I left the lunch with no real impression of her whatsoever. Later I Googled her and found nothing: a shell of a LinkedIn profile, a Twitter account with the old egg avatar and no tweets. It was like she only existed within the walls of Google. 

Magda and I nevertheless quickly clicked into an easy manager/report symbiosis. She was alpha, I was beta. She was incredible at playing the corporate politics and I had no clue. She could sell anything up the chain but had nothing of her own to sell; I had the ideas, I could write the docs, make the slide decks. She craved credit and desperately wanted to climb the corporate hierarchy; I didn’t care. The age of bullshit at Google was dawning, and Magda wanted her name on the marquee. The years zipped by, her team doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and there I was, alongside for the ride. After my rootless year-long spiral at Creative Lab, I was all too happy to be needed, useful; she needed me, I was useful. “wdyt?” [what do you think?] she would g-chat me at least 10 times a day.

I wasn’t the only person she was posing “wdyt?” to. She worked like crazy, but the thrust of her work was overseeing the cottage industry she created around herself: a symphony of consultants, agencies, and marketing managers. Everybody was scurrying around (for) her, toiling over strategy decks, rev after rev after rev, that would maybe culminate in 15 minutes of airtime in a meeting with a VP (that the deck-writer would probably not be in). She had people (mostly outside Google) for everything: for the overall team vision, insights, industry trends, all manner of creative ideas, “conversational analysis.” There was an amiable woman in DC who built an entire agency on the back of Magda’s custom swag orders (in five years on her team, the number of times I was aware of YouTube logo hoodies, totes, baby onesies, and cupcakes being shipped into the ether…shudder count 3-100!!). That nothing was really real about this work is an absolute fact. A couple times a year we would sweat out an overwrought hashtag campaign that invariably never “broke through.” But no worries: Magda had an enormous team of chipper, clean-cut data scientists who’d run the numbers and conclude we’d gotten billions of impressions. Of course we weren’t actually marketing anything to the outside world; we were just helping Magda market herself up the chain. Our offsites got increasingly lavish. Her budgets—how far we’d drifted from the modesty of the “CRM” days—ballooned to the tens of millions.

It wasn’t all decks and cupcakes—there was a darker side to it, too. She cut people from the team all the time. Someone coined it “the Magda train:” you were either onboard and charging ahead in whatever random direction she was going, or you’d be out. Imagine how this affected any development feedback she might give: good or bad, it was all loose and subjective and untethered from anything substantive, just like the work itself. “How useful were you to Magda’s pursuit of power this cycle?” would be a more honest question for the performance review. The fault lines between her and me starting forming when I got back from maternity leave, just a year or so before the Walkout. Her increasingly urgent refrain to me was that I wasn’t “hungry” enough. That I looked disinterested and tired in meetings was another (I had an infant). “You need to fight harder for what you want, you can’t just roll over,” I remember her reprimanding me for backing down on a meaningless turf war with another team (turf wars were one of her great passions). The Age of Bullshit was hotting up and she needed raw, unquestioning enthusiasm. She needed fire. She needed HUNGER! She needed mini-Magdas, not me’s. The stakes were sky-high (they couldn’t have been lower). She had to admit, though, that my decks remained excellent, some of the best she’d ever seen…

When she cut me from the team, a few weeks after the Walkout, I didn’t roll over—I fought for what I wanted (to not lose my job while pregnant). I sewed up my case and made it clearly and passionately to anyone who’d listen. She hated this as much as you can imagine. “You said some really tough things about me,” she said, sounding like Donald Trump. “The allegation that I would retaliate against you for the Walkout—God. I’m a woman of color, Claire,” which, while not untrue, was kind of surreal and lol in the moment, because a/ how would she describe what she was doing then? seriously, enlighten the class! and, b/ she’s a dead ringer for the mom from Vlad & Niki. After that, she started ignoring me altogether (this is a really long story that I’m absolutely skating over—one has to land the proverbial plane at some point!). I didn’t budge, but neither did she, and going up against Magda was like going up against Google itself: it was only going to go one way. Still, one of Magda’s favorite refrains was “it’s all about the optics.” And weren’t the optics here—getting rid of a long-serving, loyal Googler who in the eyes of the world was just trying to “hold the company to account”—godawful? You’d think she’d get a wrist slap, at least. Alas. In the couple years since, Google’s rewarded her big time for her service: she’s been promoted, handed bigger opportunities, evermore gargantuan budgets, new orgs to run. How do you like dem optics??

You’ll be ok, Firewood. You will rise from the ashes. It’s not you that we’re worried about and praying for. It’s all the people who can’t find their way outside of the borg and are at risk of choking in the Age of Bullshit!

See you on the outside, pal,

Claire

[getting laid off] is a gift: