Yeah, "different cultures and experiences" is absolutely right, it's huge, unfathomably huge.

To complete the picture I had a kind of "mediocre" story at Google, negative but not the worst possible. I was hired as the pandemic started, before anyone had figured out how to onboard me or ship me a work laptop, then the actual onboarding experience itself was a lot of talks about how "privacy is very important to us, accessibility VERY important to us, oh you can't forget that security is VERRRY important to us." (At orientation we were broken into teams and told to build an app together, but the team met like twice and was undecided about what app to build and at the end someone presented one of the three ideas of apps that we might build, as an app that we had built, and not a line of code was shed.)

Working on my team was a little better, although nobody really took me "under their wing" and when I would ping with having trouble with my dev environment my team was not very responsive. For about a year the only person on my team who really cared enough to review my CLs was halfway across the world in Singapore, so day-to-day dev work fixing bugs incurred this really long latency. For feature development, there was a different really long latency: because everyone insisted on design docs that they didn't get around to approving! So after my second perf cycle kicked in and I was told that the volume of the output was not looking great (because, on perf, maintenance work and bugs fixed doesn't really count for anything), it was just like "okay, I cannot wait for my team to actually approve these before starting the work, that'll be just like the Nooglers bickering about which app to start." So I got like 90% of the way through shipping a feature and the key stakeholders still hadn't gotten around to reviewing and approving the design doc.

The ridiculous latencies actually led to me going a little "cabin-fever"-crazy and writing stochastic simulations of work at Google so that I could give better estimates to my manager about my deadlines. I was optimized by my whatever-it-was-like-7-years at smaller companies to eliminate multitasking and pursue things with a considerable focus; but the simulations showed that my major problem was that in this high-latency environment you have to multitask as aggressively as possible: you basically need to have "this person is reviewing this for me and that person is doing that for me and I have this design doc when my CLs are waiting to be reviewed and and and...". I was working in the best way possible to get a lot of meaningful work done in a small focused team, but simulations showed it was the worst way possible to work at Google, even though the actual team size was about the same.

The cabin fever was a sort of real mental-health decline. I deferred taking my baby-bonding leave to be with my daughter for like a whole year of my wife saying "hey I really need your help here" because every week it was like "oh we'll just finally ship this thing and then I'll be leaving on a high" and it's like nope, things never really shipped. Was so focused on "respecting the opportunity" that I didn't really "respect your own biology and go to the doctor and stuff" -- it never really seemed like my work was successful enough that I was psychologically safe to take time for those basic things. The simulations helped me know that it wasn't "just me" and "here's what you need to do."

So I eventually successfully got my work output up, even to the point of doing some honest-to-goodness team leadership: I noticed that we had overcommitted on our OKRs for the upcoming Q1 2023, I had some really productive work with others at the end of Q4 2022, so I developed a design doc on "Hot Potato Agile" for how the team was going to work together like a small-company team to deliver on our ambitious OKRs and we could get everyone's OKRs done if we all worked together, I had a super-excited manager and buy-in for everyone to do this experiment with me... and then like the very next day after everyone was super excited for this thing, I and thousands of colleagues chosen apparently at random suddenly discovered that we were locked out of everything, both social and professional, for two months as we waited to be axed. Nobody knew how to contact me to say goodbye to me, eventually some folks pinged me on LinkedIn.

And like it was nice to have Tony's Chocolonely in the microkitchen on the third floor and bidets on the toilets and a barista making me free mochas on the fifth, when I was in the office. Felt very swanky. Although my favorite part, truth be told, was just the GBikes. I love the wind in my hair. And it was especially nice in the US to go to a pharmacy for my maintenance inhaler and to have my card out and the person who handed me the medicine was just like "oh don't worry about that, you owe $0, have a nice day," like "what is this, the UK or something?". But the day-to-day work felt like Sisyphus and a boulder at times, just never-ending grind to end up in the same place you started. That, I didn't like. A real mix of "Great" and "WTF".