Getting Googled, Part II - A Very Corporate Ass Fucking

Getting fired from Google is sort of like breaking up with Angelina Jolie, my boyfriend tells me.

You try to forget the unavoidable truth that you've attained and lost something everyone else seems to want, but no matter what you do, you will inevitably be reminded of your ass-chucking 40 times a day. Like Angie, Google will sneakily embed itself in your reading material and television programming, come up in random conversation when least expected, and, of course, forever taunt you with their fabulous riches and media adoration. I am writing this rant on a Google subsidiary, after all. There is no escape.

Breaking away from such an icon is expected to be a difficult affair, and I hope that even with his fear of antique furniture, Billy Bob Thorton didn't have to go through quite as much hell as my boyfriend, who is now an ex-Googler.

See, despite their virtuous motto, they treat their employees with about as much diplomacy and discretion as your average Fortune 100 company-- that is to say, with very little.

It is one thing when, at the company retreat, they put you in a room with a guy that gets wasted on the first night and wakes you by banging a random chick so loud on the bed next to you that you're not only somewhat traumatized, but strangely turned off by the sounds of tennis forever. (Don’t worry, they will give you a new room to smooth things over the next day.)

It is another thing entirely when, after being placed in a new position, you are forced to go in circles with HR and all your superiors just to get the message across that your job is incompatible with your skill-set... and then instead of trying to move you, work with you, or listen to you, having them all ignore and ridicule you for a year while they slowly try to make you no longer exist.

This is what you would expect at Microsoft, sure. But it seems kinda evil to me.

As far as I can tell, Google suffers from all the HR nightmares you'd expect at any other major conglomerate. They like to flaunt a lot of existential garbage on the way in about dynamic team-building, the best-of-the-best, and exciting career possibilities, but really, they are operating straight from the text of Corporate Ladder Building 101. Maybe they put applicants through so many pre-interview tests and questionnaires to explain their rejection of so many people, but once you're past those hurdles, it's business as usual.

Basically, it works like this: Google first decides they like you by 1- placing an inordinate amount of emphasis on where you got your degree(s), and 2- putting you through an insane amount of personality testing that determines whether or not you are cool enough (or dorky enough, depending on how you look at it,) to hang out with them. My boyfriend was graced with an Ivy League education and a music industry resume, so they took him as a Temp and quickly offered him a permanent position once in the door, which is par for the course.

The problem came when they told him he was going to have to work his way up to what he actually wanted to do at the company, and instead of gleaning (or even attempting to understand) what it was he actually had to offer, they put him in the first thing they had available and left him to flounder. Imagine being an accountant, getting a job at the best company in the world, and then finding out you’ve been put on the marketing team-- and have to be awesome on it for at least a year in order to do anything else.

Mr. Fox (as he will be known herein to protect his future employability) is a creative kind of guy. He comes up with inventions and business ideas like I come up with hangovers. When we took the LSAT together way back when, he showed up at the break with a song written on his scrap paper, which he came up with during the freaking logic games section. An idea man, if you will.

He went to Google with the hope of using this creative skill-set, and made these wishes clear. At the time he was hired, however, there was no "Creative Team" or anything of the sort. Everyone pitched in on the creative process, he was told, his input would be valuable, etc, and whatever he did come up with would help place him in a future promotion. So when HR initially offered a position to him, they sold him on the fact that it was in “entertainment”, and hey, he was into that, being a musician and all, right? Well, “entertainment,” it turned out, was entering 5,000 keywords for a Batman DVD into a spreadsheet. Then, only a few weeks after he was permanently hired, the obvious need for an internal creative resource caused the company to make such a team because they probably should have had one years ago.

But, alas. In order for Mr. Fox to get to the Creative team, he was told he would have to manage enormous spreadsheets of key words with a team of ball-busting perfectionists for an undetermined amount of time first, because NO ONE can move ANYWHERE at Google without 1- the consent and endorsement of their bossman/lady, and 2- a year of hitting their "projected goals," aka getting 4 consecutive B's on their quarterly report cards. It doesn’t matter how long your resume is, or how good you are at something else. You have to prove your worker bee worth, first.

This did not work out so well for him.

Some people are not proofreaders. These are big-picture people who tend to outsource details, and they need proofreaders themselves. Trying to make these people minutia-loving spelling Nazis is like trying to turn a Porsche into a pony-- the essential building blocks are simply wrong. So his job took him twice as long to do, and he fucking hated it. And his boss, a new mom who clearly did not care about anything but wanting to go home, was not very nice. To put it mildly. But he stayed because of the promise of things to come. Then he found out that was all horse shit, too.

See, corporations operate on the HR philosophy of earn-and-receive. You earn ratings from your team income and team/management grading of your performance, and if you do well, you 1) get more money-- in the case of Google, they raise and reduce your bonuses based on your grades-- and 2) have the opportunity to move up or to a job that doesn’t suck. And Mr. Fox, lucky guy that he is, was on a team that was working against him, blamed him for everything that went wrong, and essentially fucked him out of ever going anywhere but out the door, despite the fact that he earned them all healthy bonuses.

He did this by winning a company-wide creative competition with a campaign that was totally unrelated to his job, but that each team needed to submit something for. He came up with the whole concept, and then salvaged the mess that those anal bitches turned it into with their text-crammed PowerPoint Presentation. At aforementioned conference with aforementioned tennis-grunt-fucking, he earned his team members an equal cut of substantial cash winnings and VIP access for the week.

He also came up with several other ideas for them, for free, on his own time-- new media stuff for YouTube that he pitched to several of his superiors, and that MySpace later stole (or psychically channeled) and rolled out before he could get anyone with a budget to do anything. It was pretty obvious that someone had either leaked or sold his ideas since the campaigns were almost identical, and this even lead to a brief internal investigation, which stopped at upper-middle management because they decided taking it further probably wouldn't yield any "results."

He made a lot of friends on the new Creative Team doing all this extracurricular work, and they expressed keen interest in getting him out of the sales-report trenches. But you cannot move (promoted or laterally) in a corporation without your daddy’s say so. And, like I said before, his daddy was a bitch. ***I should note Mr. Fox would never say this, because he is a gentleman. But I am a foul-mouthed lady with no connection to these people, so I can say what I want. And I read some of the e-mails she sent him near the end, and I can testify to said bitchiness.

I can also tell you:

- No man ever survived his boss. When he got there, there was only one other guy on his team, and he was the whipping boy who got blamed for everything and was fired within months of Mr. Fox's arrival. Granted, he was pretty fucking terrible at his job from what I hear, but the point remains. While he was still there Mr. Fox got good report cards. Once he was gone, well.

- In whipping boy #1’s absence, Mr. Fox took up the mantle. He did not belong in the position, and he made it pretty clear to his boss early on that he wanted to move to something that was more in tune with his interests and skill set. This was a Very Bad Idea. Once she ascertained this, it was easy for her to blame him for whatever she wanted, because he didn’t want to be there anyway, the ungrateful bastard. She had a NEW BABY. He was just some carefree musician kid. Whenever a “build” (keyword-filled spreadsheet madness) was off, it was his fault. Whenever “communication” (a thing that actually requires more than 1 party) was lacking, it was his fault. Naturally this was not an easy way to work, and it tipped everyone else on the team off that they could blame him for their fuck-ups, too.

- Once targeted by a pack of cornered females, there is no hope of survival, and going up against your boss in Corporate America is like taking on Rambo-- bish, you gonn die. His attempt to move to Creative coincided with the economy freaking its shit out last year, and they needed a fall man when the team only hit 70% of their projected income. Why not blame it on the guy who didn’t want to be there anyway? And, you know, make a bunch of shit up to get rid of him.

- His boss put him on one of those “Action Plans” that are basically fair warning that they’re trying to get rid of you. She did not tell him that he was expected to do things like give her weekly updates once this thing started, so he was further reprimanded and made to look even worse when he didn’t. She then came to an HR meeting he called to try to straighten things out with a list of fabricated and largely delusional versions of events that she then tried to get him to sign. When he refused, she and the HR lady then informed him it didn’t matter if he signed it or not, because she was his manager and her reports were as sacred as the fucking scrolls, as far as they were concerned. She then made his Action Plan include goals that were rationally unachievable, on purpose, and wouldn’t admit that she was asking the impossible.

- When he went to his boss’ boss for some kind of guidance, he was told that he couldn’t call his boss a liar because she had been there longer, and this guy was friends with her, so, sorry, but tough cookies. When he went to HR, he was told he couldn’t move positions, anywhere, at all, without a positive rating from his boss. So.

- The bitch was demoted just 2 days before Mr. Fox's "Action Plan" reached it's inevitable end. Small justice, but better than nothing.

Now in all fairness, Mr. Fox did take that awful spreadsheet job of his own free will. And he admittedly knew going in it wasn’t what he really wanted to do at the company. The problem was there were no entry-level positions that would have offered him the proper spring-board for what he did want. He would have had to be a good data-entry drone for a while, no matter what, and I just don't see that working. It's like imagining Don Draper doing a budget report-- he could do it, but why would you want to make him? Make him for over a year, if you knew he didn't like it, wasn't very good at it, and was really good at other stuff you needed done? I mean. It drove him crazy and he really wanted to just quit, but Mr. Fox needed the unemployment, so he stuck it out. He knew he was a marked man once the main advertiser funding his team cut their budget by 50% and everybody was like, oh shit here comes restructuring. He was Action Planned immediately, but it took them MONTHS to pull the trigger. Why the delay? Of course, it's just another lovely aspect of their protocol.

He was so happy on his last day. I mean, he gets like 99 weeks of unemployment now. So, in the long run, I guess the bitch sort of did him a favor. Nevertheless, there is still something ugly about this story.

While it might not be obviously evil, there is a nastiness lurking this typical HR policy of theirs.

Why do these businesses, even ones that try or claim to be progressive, think that in order to be an effective worker in a coveted position, you must first be an effective drone?

Why do you have to be a good assistant to work your way up the corporate ladder?

Some people are just not good assistants, and those people are probably not good proofreaders, either. Does that mean these people hold no value in the corporate world?

The answer appears to be Yes-- and for a company that relies on innovation, creativity, and adaptability like Google, that seems pretty stupid.

The larger a company grows, the more difficult it is for anyone to make any relevant changes to its structure. I dealt with this shit myself at Universal Music (see post below), and I can tell you, it didn't help business. So why doesn't Google take its own advice?

It's been said that ignorance is the root of all evil, after all-- if they want to live up to their motto, they should really rethink their obtuse corporate hierarchy.