Well, it’s been all go over at Macdonald Acres.
Our big move happens next Friday and we’re still in the thick of packing up our belongings. Jack, Sarah’s brother, arrived this afternoon and will be staying with us for a couple of days. It’s nice to have a visitor again.
My theoretical last day of employment with Google came and went, but not without event. Senior staff with four years of experience working for the company are something of a rarity and cannot, by definition, be hired afresh, so I have been made a generous offer to remain with the company even after our transatlantic move.
After some surprisingly easy negotiations, the upshot is as follows. I will leave Google Inc. (the American company) and receive the offer of a transfer to Google BV (the Dutch company). The new salary I have been offered is generous by Dutch standards and the small number of unvested shares I have outstanding would continue to vest at the same rate as now.
Since I honestly don’t know how I will feel about the prospect of full-time employment three months from now (after all, I’ve spent the last year thinking that I would take on the role of full-time father and travel around Europe with Sarah), I’m going to take a three month unpaid sabbatical from now until early November.
At the end of this sabbatical, I will either accept the transfer to Google Netherlands or simply thank them for their kind offer and choose a new path in life.
If I do choose to work for Google Netherlands, it doesn’t actually mean that I’d be working for the Dutch company in an organisational sense; it merely means that I’d be on the Dutch payroll and enjoy the benefits afforded workers in The Netherlands. I’d still work for Operations, doing much the same work as I do now. My boss might change to be someone closer to home, probably in Ireland, but that would be about the only concrete change from my current circumstances.
I’m not yet sure whether I’d work from the Google office in Amsterdam or simply toil from home. It would depend how much of a distraction having Sarah and Eloïse around turned out to be. Furthermore, having colleagues in an office forces one to be sociable, so that’s another aspect I might enjoy. On the other hand, the Amsterdam office is really only a sales office and I don’t want to become the de facto Windows helpdesk bitch (which is virtually impossible, anyway, as I know very little about Windows desktops these days).
Anyway, this is all just so much musing and theory at the present time. Right now, it’s hard to imagine continuing to work full-time for anyone, even Google, after our move. I mean, Google’s a fantastic company to work for, but how can any job be so much fun that it’s more attractive than all of the other things one could be doing with one’s time? A great job is still just a job, right? It can surely never be more fun than biking through the Ardennes, sipping coffee in a Parisian café, glacier-walking in Iceland, snorkeling in Hawaii, trekking to Machu Picchu in Peru, visiting the hill tribes of Thailand and Vietnam, listening to street musicians in Cuba, riding a horse in Mongolia, ascending the mountains of Pakistan and Nepal, or immersing oneself in the culture of Iran and Syria.
We’ll see how I feel three months from now. At the very least, this new development means I will now remain an (unpaid) employee of Google until at least November.
I’ve put up new photos of Eloïse from weeks eleven and twelve. These will probably be the last photos for a while, as the movers turn up next Wednesday to pick up our stuff. We then fly out of here on Friday and will have no Net access for a while, unless someone in our neighbourhood happens to have an open wireless access point (fingers crossed).