Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Well, my last day at Google came and passed very much as I expected it would. I tied up all of my loose ends, went out to lunch at the Palo Alto Creamery and then spent the afternoon walking around the various buildings, shaking the hand of a lot of people with whom I’ve worked over the last few years.

Then, I collected a few items together and biked away from the building for the last time, with the strains of the Inspiral Carpets’ Two Worlds Collide in my headphones. Somehow, this song, playing at random, captured the mood of the moment very well.

Before I left, I managed to have a very brief chat with my boss, Marc. It turns out that neither he nor his boss wishes to accept my resignation. Instead, I’ve been informally offered the opportunity to keep my job and work remotely from Amsterdam. It seems they would rather deal with the inconvenience of having me work from the other side of the world than lose a senior member of staff.

Whilst I’m incredibly flattered by the offer, I’m currently unable to assess how I will feel about it three months from now. The last few years have been incredibly tiring and I have spent the last twelve months growing accustomed to the idea that I would be leaving the company. Accordingly, my head is filled with exciting plans for the future, none of which involve the demands of holding down a full-time job.

On the other hand, Google is one of the most dynamic companies on the planet and has realised just a small fraction of the endeavours with which it will dazzle the world in the years to come. Many people would give their right testicle for the chance to work there, so wouldn’t I be crazy just to turn my back on the place and walk away, even if I no longer need the money?

It is with these thoughts that I now wrestle.

I’ve proposed to my boss that I embark on a three month unpaid sabbatical, at the end of which I would either make a firm commitment to continue working for Google or shake hands and go my own merry way. I have yet to discover with what kind of reception my proposal will meet.

Even if I were to decide that I would like to stay with the company, there would be a lot of details to work out. Apart from salary and secondary benefits, would I work from home or bike into the local office each day? What work would I do? Exactly what I do now, a subtle variation or something wildly different?

It makes no sense to speculate at this point, since I know neither whether this offer will continue to solidify, nor whether I will have any interest in it once Sarah and I have started to live our new life in Amsterdam, with the myriad new opportunities and distractions it will offer.

We’ll just have to wait and see what develops.

Tomorrow will be my last day in the office at Google.

In the morning, I will get on my bike and ride for the last time my route along Showers Drive, California Street and Rengstorff Avenue, finally arriving at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, where the security guard will check my badge and tell me to Have a great day! I still don’t know his name, even though he’s been waving me into the grounds of the campus ever since Google took over the building from SGI in early 2004.

I think one of my colleagues is arranging an off-site lunch for me tomorrow, so I might actually have eaten my last lunch in the Google café this afternoon. I didn’t even stop to consider it at the time. As usual, I just got annoyed at the speed (or lack thereof) at which people were choosing their food and equipping themselves with cutlery.

Shit, I’ll miss that café when I’m gone; I’ve almost been institutionalised by it. Thanks to that café, one need never carry cash or cook for oneself. Only at the weekends does one flounder and wonder what the gnawing in one’s stomach might be.

My in-box of my work e-mail is down to a single message, one reminding me to pick up a beach towel if I happened to miss out on them at the Engineering off-site party a few weeks ago. That towel will almost certainly be the last item of exclusive Google company gear that I get to bring home with me.

I have one outstanding piece of code left to check into our source management system. Once my office mate performs the code review, I’ll check it in and my slate will pretty much be clean. No-one is waiting for further code reviews from me, everything is documented and I’ve fixed all of the bugs I can fix.

There won’t be much left for me to do in the afternoon, except clear my desk and wander around and shake a few hands. Bollocks! I’m making myself feel melancholic, just thinking about it.

Four years is a significant chunk of my life and four years at Google feel like eight spent anywhere else. I’ve been dreaming of this day for years and, now that it’s here, it’s bittersweet. I always knew it would be, though; this isn’t the first job I’ve resigned from, but it is, in many ways, the most memorable. It will affect the rest of my life in ways no other job has or really could. For that, I will always be grateful beyond mere words.

Officially, I still have a couple of weeks of paid leave before I take my final leave of the company, but in practical terms, my retirement begins the day after tomorrow. That’s only a day away and yet, even at this late stage, I still can’t even conceive of not having to work again; or even of having been to work at Google for the very last time. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge at that company and I find myself feeling very sentimental about the place at this moment in time.

Bollocks! Tomorrow’s going to be a tough day.