Embracing Chaos

I caved.  I took a job with Google as a Product Manager.  I start today.  I’m down in Mountain View all week to have kool-aid forcibly injected intravenously.  Make note of this day and see if you can sense a shift in tone of my posts as time continues.  We’ll see when I start thinking and posting about Google in first person.  This change is important to you my dear readers for a couple of other reasons. 

Most significantly is around intellectual property.  Google’s IP policy for its employees can be effectively summarized as "All your base are belong to us."  It’s a fairly standard employment agreement — anything I do or think of on Google’s time or using Google’s equipment belongs to Google.  The only exception is if I do something entirely on my own that is not related to Google’s current or reasonably foreseeable future business.  I’m not a lawyer, but California and Washington laws both read about the same.  The thing with Google is that essentially nothing in technology is outside of that scope.  Designing juggling balls or running shoes might be.  This was a concern for me in considering the position.  But in the end I couldn’t resist.

I suspect this means I won’t be able to post as much about what the industry needs to be doing.  On the flip-side, hopefully I’ll be in a position to be getting the industry to do these things.  People often ask me what I’ll be working on, and I always answer honestly that I don’t know.  As a Product Manager I’ll be working on products but not writing code — this is similar to a PM role in other companies, but there are very few at Google and their relationship is much more of a peer than in some companies.  As to products, I think everybody has to work on ads as a kind of penance.  But hopefully when I get my feet on the ground I’ll be working on all the things I’ve been posting about here.

Personally this means I’m going to be extremely busy for a while as I finish up a full quarter at school and start up a new job.  I’ll also be a cross-bridge commuter heading into Kirkland most days which I’m really unexcited about.  But the opportunity to work with lots of brilliant people and have a huge impact on the world makes up for it.  I’m pretty excited!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 7:21 AM and is filed under Ego, Google, Personal Growth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.