How to get fired on Google

Developer Grigory Yakushev responded to question on Quora for how it feels to get kicked out of Google. He told his story of being fired after five years of working for the search giant. Grigory himself graduated from Moscow State University, and now he got a job at the Swiss startup Mediahead Programmatic Advertising and works in Zurich. According to him, he is doing well, much better than it has been in recent months on Google. Here is a translation of his story.

“I feel like I'm the right person to answer this question because I was fired from Google in April of this year after five years at the company.

I began to feel that I was burning out a year before: my productivity had dropped about five times (on average, from five assignments a week to one, within the framework of the same project and environment). So, I had to change something. And I decided to change the team - I moved to the semantic search division (RefX command).

It was a mistake: search is the largest and most complex product on Google, and semantic search (the thing that gives you a specific answer to a query instead of links) is being worked on by one of the smartest teams in the world. Against the background of the burnout, I not only did not recover my performance indicators, but began to work even worse.

My relationship with the manager and the director also began to deteriorate: they took another guy to the team, because they could not get the necessary results from me. At first, my managers tried to introduce a more rigid discipline: they controlled when I was sitting at the computer, when I came in and left work. Because of this, I felt even worse.

In a private discussion, I was asked why I was not leaving on my own. I replied that I really like the salary at Google. If Google doesn't like the way I work - no problem, fire me, but I myself am not going to leave.

In March, I took a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan). This is a formal agreement that requires me to demonstrate some degree of performance within two months. After a week, it became obvious to me that I could not cope. I spoke to HR and the director again, and they threatened to fire me for Gross Misconduct - no benefits and no work period. Apparently, my manager and director decided that I was trying to beat the system and just milk the company without doing anything in return.

As a result, they did not end my PIP and gave me a statement about the expiration of the contract next week. I returned all the technology that Google gave me, and the badge, my manager took me out of the building - it all took about 10 minutes. My Google employee account was disabled at the same time. The manager and I went to a nearby cafe, and he even paid for the drinks. ????

In my contract was marked the month for which I should have been warned about the dismissal. I got it post factum. So for another month I was formally an employee and received a salary, although I did not work. Google also gave me a great reference letter for future employers, without mentioning all these facts.

In general, all this was unpleasant, which is quite logical in a situation of burnout. I think that the nasty attitude of the manager and the director was optional: when the superiors do not trust you and think that you are a liar, but they don’t speak in person, that is crap. The team, in turn, did not know about the ongoing processes. The guys were great and very supportive of me - probably one of the smartest people I have ever worked with.

I have fully recovered since then. Changing divisions didn’t help, but changing companies did.”

Previously "Forum" опубликовал 15 is a strange question that is asked at interviews at Google.

Forty thousand employees work at Google, but they all speak the same language, in which words that are not understandable to outsiders sometimes come across. we unscrambled "Google" dialect.