I joined Google in 2015. Over the past 10 years, I have worked in teams across digital marketing, business transformation, app development, YouTube, startups, and more. I have worked in different regions and supported thousands of company executives in growing their businesses internationally. This has been the most transformative career, and I have met so many inspiring mentors and friends. Yet earlier this year, I decided to leave what many consider their dream company. After sharing my learnings from Google, it's time to share the other side of the story - 10 reasons that led to my departure from Google. It's deeply personal, but I hope sharing my experience gives you a different lens on tech careers and what success actually means.
When I first joined Google, it was a pioneering tech company proving that amazing work could be done without dressing up in suits and traditional workplace settings. The fancy perks and facilities shook the industry and successfully attracted top talent. It has been the role model for tech companies and startups. However, fast-forwarding to 10 years later, most tech companies today have a similar lean structure and perks similar to Google's. While this is a reflection of the workforce benefits improvements, for Googlers it means lower opportunity costs to jump ship.
The team I joined a decade ago had around 10 people; now the same team has grown to more than 300 people. As any startup grows into a corporation, you naturally get more layers, more managers, and more processes. What does that mean for ambitious workers? Less empowerment, impact, and ownership. Here's a concrete example: my role 10 years ago gave me direct influence with 80% of the region's top executives. The exact same role today reaches less than 10% of that portfolio, with most time spent on preparing decks rather than strategic influence, which has been moved to the middle managers. In other words, the overall revenue per headcount has dropped significantly. More importantly, all these additional layers have increased complexity, limited collaboration, and reduced agility, which is reflected in Google's slow response to competition these days.
What I love most about Google is its internal mobility. Built across many products with billions of users, Googlers can apply to different teams across different regions. Over the past decade, I have taken on 4 different roles and 2 side gigs across different teams and regions. These roles enabled me to grow my knowledge across different product areas, expand my exposure across industries and regions, develop a vast professional network, and build strong cross-functional collaborative skills. After 10 years of exploration, my learning curve has inevitably slowed down and been outgrown by the comfort of staying in the same company for too long. There's still a lot of growth and learning every day, but it's just not as "uncomfortably exciting" anymore.
As Google evolved from startup to tech behemoth, it became accountable not just to employees but to investors demanding sustained growth and market dominance. Essentially, this translates to stretched targets and more metrics. New systems are introduced to assess workers' performance based on quantitative output, which for some of the time are not meaningful metrics at all. When the system incentivizes speed and absolute output, it is at the same time penalizing quality and creativity. I was very lucky to be in a unique role that still maintained a high level of autonomy, but in my daily interactions, I can see how people are not motivated to work "above and beyond" anymore.
We used to have this amazing 20% project policy, where employees were encouraged to spend 20% of their work hours contributing to side gigs with other teams, fostering collaboration, career development, and driving innovation. However, more and more managers have discouraged their teams from applying for 20% projects as a result of more demanding targets from senior management. I tried to recruit 20%ers for a specific project and was told by the applicants that they were not able to secure approval from their own managers.
I've watched the hiring standards change over the years for several reasons. First, Google hired aggressively during COVID, which naturally lowered the bar. I was on the hiring committee for a certain position, and there was a time when HR reached out to me pushing to hire applicants with a "no hire" remark, merely because of the urgent need to fulfill the hiring target. Secondly, as Google set up other businesses such as cloud, it had to hire talent from other industry players such as Microsoft, Amazon, etc., who do not share the same culture. For example, "Googleyness" (which is a mix of values such as supportiveness and doing the right thing) was one of the deal-breakers in the hiring process back then, but wasn't as emphasized these days when compared with role-related knowledge.
In 2019, COVID broke out and everyone went through a period of remote working. It wasn't new to Googlers as we always had a flexible working style, where Googlers had the discretion to work from home. My work at Google involved a lot of business travel for customer meetings, events, and offsites, and during COVID everything had to move to virtual. Yet, this period of prolonged remote working made me realize an alternate lifestyle, with productivity maintained if not enhanced, and where commute time could be saved and repurposed for personal endeavors. As someone who values personal space, this was a wake-up call for me, especially after becoming a caregiver and getting more intentional about how I spend my time. As of now, tech companies are strongly enforcing "return to office" policies, and while there are still many benefits of working in person, there's also a huge chunk of workers who have chosen to opt for other opportunities that support remote work.
The real breaking point was in 2023 when massive layoffs happened. On January 20, 2023, I woke up to discover Google had cut off access for 12,000 employees overnight, without any warning, claiming it would 'set us up for the future.' We did not have access to a list of impacted staff, and all we could do was ping our colleagues to check if they had survived the layoff. I wasn't able to reach a number of my work counterparts, including a colleague who worked for me on a side project. I still remember refreshing LinkedIn every few hours to learn who was being impacted and bidding farewells with people on the platform. To some, and the Wall Street, this may seem to be a reasonable and predictable business decision, but to many Googlers, this was the end of an era. For those who have worked at Google, you will learn for a fact that it's very hard to get rid of workers (which we seldom need to because of the rigorous hiring bar). Even for non-performers, managers are expected to help build a developmental plan and provide enough assistance before they could even think about further actions. On that day, the Google bubble burst. What was replaced ever since then was a new normal of constant and unpredictable layoffs, which is still carried out today. This has massively transformed the culture. Psychological safety is sabotaged, and people reported behaviors of aggression and backstabbing. I heard stories of colleagues having to prove to managers that they were more valuable than their teammates just to keep their jobs. Even though my team was not impacted, there was this anxiety across the organisation that anything could happen the next minute.
The AI arms race has intensified competition and pressure inside tech companies. While this is good for the market in my opinion, for workers this means even more stretched targets, more re-orgs, and more redundancy. I, just like the rest of the team, was put on this endless rat race of targets, case studies, and launches in order to justify the team's value; and it has become barely possible for me to learn and keep myself up to date with industry developments such as AI. Learning has been the most important consideration for my professional development, and ironically I was feeling lagged behind despite being in one of the best tech companies. More importantly, the more I learned about AI's capabilities, the more I think that the current workforce could be replaced by AI within a matter of years. What's the point in that case to stay?
As a result of the above, I was pretty drained in 2024 balancing my career, learning, as well as family duties. I was in a global position where my work hours spanned from 7am to 10pm, and I barely had time for myself, not to mention any social life. My physical and mental health had taken a toll, and unfortunately, I was not the only one. What used to be energizing and inspiring 1:1s have now become venting about work toxicity and exit plans. Google has stopped being the place of growth for me. Maybe Google has changed. Maybe I have changed.
All of this made me step back and reassess. I started working with career coaches and reading books about change. I realized I was stuck in what I call the Zone of Mediocrity, when things weren't great, but they weren't bad enough to force me into action. To counteract the inertia, I made a list of things that I really wanted to do:
I asked myself: with the disruption of AI and volatility in the industry, is there a better time to leave and reinvent life? My answer was no. Of course, it wasn't as easy as said but instead a year-long struggle, but eventually I decided to take the leap of faith and step out of the comfort zone.
As of now, it has been 6 months since I have taken the pathless path, and I am nothing more than grateful. I used to define myself by my company and job title, but now I'm on a journey to discover what else is possible. Surprisingly, life is richer without a 9-5, and more importantly, I've reclaimed control over my time to focus on personal growth, mentor aspiring founders and restoring my mental health. Looking back, joining Google has been one of the best decisions in my life, while it is also the Google ethos of "Do the right thing" that has pushed me to stay true to my own compass.
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