My misadventure with Google seems to have occurred because I was a mensch to my former employer and stayed a couple months longer to finish my project after Google recruited me out of the blue like gangbusters.
During this time several really intriguing projects in Google expressed interest in me but immediately lost said interest when I told them how long it would be between their phone call and my arrival at Google.
So when I got there, after having quit my former employer, I arrived unallocated and got thrown into the blind allocation pool. There were seemingly 3 choices for me but 2 of them were effectively withdrawn for different reasons almost immediately (and it was pretty bizarre the way this played out IMO). This left me with one choice - to work on a team that made zero use of any of the skills that attracted Google to me in the first place (and I got the standard silly speech about Google wanting generalists). But having quit my job for this I accepted and decided to dive in and give it my best. It didn't work out in a big way - it was a crappy project and I was blocked from transferring out and even taken aside and scolded for discretely talking to other teams.
Fortunately, I've been at enough dysfunctional startups to have become adept at the diving catch (I just never in a million years thought something like this would happen at Google). So after 4 months of this nonsense, and talking to some friends who had gone through similar experiences there in the past wherein it took them 2-3 years to climb out of the crater it made in their career, I left for greener pastures, taking a very slight cut in pay to go back to doing what I do best (which is insane because IMO Google really needs people who do what I do well but I digress).
During this time several really intriguing projects in Google expressed interest in me but immediately lost said interest when I told them how long it would be between their phone call and my arrival at Google.
So when I got there, after having quit my former employer, I arrived unallocated and got thrown into the blind allocation pool. There were seemingly 3 choices for me but 2 of them were effectively withdrawn for different reasons almost immediately (and it was pretty bizarre the way this played out IMO). This left me with one choice - to work on a team that made zero use of any of the skills that attracted Google to me in the first place (and I got the standard silly speech about Google wanting generalists). But having quit my job for this I accepted and decided to dive in and give it my best. It didn't work out in a big way - it was a crappy project and I was blocked from transferring out and even taken aside and scolded for discretely talking to other teams.
Fortunately, I've been at enough dysfunctional startups to have become adept at the diving catch (I just never in a million years thought something like this would happen at Google). So after 4 months of this nonsense, and talking to some friends who had gone through similar experiences there in the past wherein it took them 2-3 years to climb out of the crater it made in their career, I left for greener pastures, taking a very slight cut in pay to go back to doing what I do best (which is insane because IMO Google really needs people who do what I do well but I digress).