Although the asshat who accused me of threatening to shoot him for six weeks has faded away, other asshats are popping up to replace him on Slashdot. One asshat posted comments not to my comments but to the comments that I replied to, but I periodically rechecked older threads and respond to each of those wayward comments. Another asshat complained about my weight (I’m 350 pounds — think football player), my diet (daily calorie intake is 1,500 calories), and why I haven’t committed suicide yet (I’m too sexy die young). One asshat in particular kept misrepresenting my work history with Google in multiple comments, as if I struck a nerve by working at Google. And perhaps I did. Let’s look at my “complicated” work history at Google.
Most people have the erroneous assumption that Google hires only “the best of the best of the best, sir!” (Men In Black) from the leading universities around the world. That’s true for direct hires like engineers and managers. (But maybe not for long, according to Fast Company, as tech companies hire tech workers without four-year degrees to fill their ranks.) Direct hires are a small part of Google. Everyone else who works at Google are hired through vendors for different functions throughout the company.
After I graduated from San Jose City College with an Associate of Science (A.S.) degree in computer programming and made the president’s list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major, a vendor hired me for what was my first of several assignments in 2007-2008. A different vendor would hire me for several more assignments in 2011-12.
2007-2008
I’ve worked in the Google IT help desk call center for seven months from 2007 to 2008. For the first three months, I was in dispatch and routing 300+ tickets per day to the call center techs, fields techs or other groups like facilities. I’ve worked in the call center for the remaining four months, assisting users when I can, opening tickets when I can’t, and doing whatever I can remotely (i.e., installing software, opening network jacks with the correct VLAN, or adding hostnames to DNS). Since the average Googler gains 26 pounds from eating the free food and move their desk every three months, this was a high-paced environment that kept me busy for eight hours a day.
Since the vendor I worked for lost the call center contract to the Indian firm that managed the call centers for Google in India and Europe, a group of us worked in inventory for a month before transferring to a new assignment at eBay. Google at the time hired 300+ people per week. We got shipments of hardware in on Friday and Monday, got everything unboxed and put away by Tuesday, spent Wednesday prepping 300+ systems to go out the door, and loaded up the vans on Thursday mornings for deployment. Before we could take a breather, the cycle started all over again.
As a reward for my brief stint in inventory, I got a Kensington backpack that Google used to give to their new hires back then. Nine years later I’m still using that backpack, now flaying at the edges and falling apart from working all over Silicon Valley.
The Great Recession
I worked at eBay for 13 months before I got laid off on Friday the 13th, February 2009 (my supervisor let me pick the date from a list). That was the beginning of my journey as 99’er in the aftermath of the Great Recession, spending two years out of work (2009-2010), underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month at a moving company), and filing for Chapter Seven bankruptcy in 2011. When my bankruptcy got finalized in July 2011, I had $25 left in my checking account and a new full-time job at a different vendor to become the lead tech of a PC refresh project at… eBay.
One of the phone guys at eBay gave me a hero’s welcome: “Jesus Christ, if HR let this guy back in, they will hire anyone off the streets.”
For the next two years (2011-2013) I would work seven days a week to re-establish my finances. I’ve worked over 30+ assignment for three different vendors that competed for my availability. I had a regular Monday-Friday assignment, and a weekend assignment that sometimes starts on Friday nights. Assignments that lasted a week or more went on my resume, shorter assignment that lasted four hours to several days I didn’t bother to keep track.
That would bite me in the ass in 2014 when the two-hour background interview for the security clearance at my current tech job lasted four hours because I had to list every assignment since 2007. Unlike most Fortune 500 HR departments, government investigators checked out every reference and requested credit reports from all three reporting bureaus. They were quite thorough.
2011-2012
When the PC refresh project at eBay had a six-week lull after the holidays, a different vendor offered a one-month assignment at Google to build out a data center. I started working at Google the day after Christmas in December 2011 and finished at the end of January 2012. Unlike my experiences from working at the call center and in inventory, we sat around waiting for parts — servers, switches, routers, twisted-pair and fiber optics cables, odds and ends — to arrive in the morning and spent the afternoon installing everything into the racks.
When the data center got done, the manager took us over to the Google Store to buy something up to $25 in value (I got a pair of Google running shorts) and we had dinner at Building 51 (the former nickname for a sports bar at the edge of the Google campus). I went back to eBay to finish the PC refresh project.
A few months later I would come back to do a one-week cleanup at the data center. Besides throwing out the trash, consolidating equipment on multiple pallets into fewer pallets, and sweeping the floor, I also had to verify that the port mapping info in the spreadsheet was accurate, remove decommissioned servers from the rack, and relocate severs around the data center. Unlike last time, there was no trip to the Google Store or Building 51.
Sometimes being “the best of the best of the best, sir!” at Google is just rolling up your sleeves to do the jobs that no one else wants to do.