Opinion

After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love

a Job Again
I learned the hard way that no publicly traded company is a family.

 
Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

By Emi Nietfeld

Ms. Nietfeld is a software engineer. She worked at Google from 2015 to 2019.

 April 7, 2021

I used to be a Google engineer. That often feels like the defining fact about my
life. When I joined the company after college in 2015, it was at the start of a
multiyear reign atop Forbes’s list of best workplaces.

I bought into the Google dream completely. In high school, I spent time
homeless and in foster care, and was often ostracized for being nerdy. I longed
for the prestige of a blue-chip job, the security it would bring and a collegial
environment where I would work alongside people as driven as I was.

What I found was a surrogate family. During the week, I ate all my meals at the
office. I went to the Google doctor and the Google gym. My colleagues and I
piled into Airbnbs on business trips, played volleyball in Maui after a big
product launch and even spent weekends together, once paying $170 and
driving hours to run an obstacle course in the freezing rain.
My manager felt like the father I wished I’d had. He believed in my potential
and cared about my feelings. All I wanted was to keep getting promoted so that
as his star rose, we could keep working together. This gave purpose to every
task, no matter how grueling or tedious.
The few people who’d worked at other companies reminded us that there was
nowhere better. I believed them, even when my technical lead — not my
manager, but the man in charge of my day-to-day work — addressed me as
“beautiful” and “gorgeous,” even after I asked him to stop. (Finally, I agreed that
he could call me “my queen.”) He used many of our one-on-one meetings to ask
me to set him up with friends, then said he wanted “A blonde. A tall blonde.”
Someone who looked like me.

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Saying anything about his behavior meant challenging the story we told
ourselves about Google being so special. The company anticipated our every
need — nap pods, massage chairs, Q-Tips in the bathroom, a shuttle system to
compensate for the Bay Area’s dysfunctional public transportation — until the
outside world began to seem hostile. Google was the Garden of Eden; I lived in
fear of being cast out.

When I talked to outsiders about the harassment, they couldn’t understand: I

had one of the sexiest jobs in the world. How bad could it be? I asked myself
this, too. I worried that I was taking things personally and that if anyone knew I
was upset, they’d think I wasn’t tough enough to hack it in our intense
environment.

So I didn’t tell my manager about my tech lead’s behavior for more than a year.
Playing along felt like the price of inclusion. I spoke up only when it looked like
he would become an official manager — my manager — replacing the one I
adored and wielding even more power over me. At least four other women said
that he’d made them uncomfortable, in addition to two senior engineers who
already made it clear that they wouldn’t work with him.

As soon as my complaint with H.R. was filed, Google went from being a great
workplace to being any other company: It would protect itself first. I’d
structured my life around my job — exactly what they wanted me to do — but
that only made the fallout worse when I learned that the workplace that I
cherished considered me just an employee, one of many and disposable.

The process stretched out for nearly three months. In the meantime I had to
have one-on-one meetings with my harasser and sit next to him. Every time I
asked for an update on the timeline and expressed my discomfort at having to
continue to work in proximity to my harasser, the investigators said that I could
seek counseling, work from home or go on leave. I later learned that Google had
similar responses to other employees who reported racism or sexism. Claire
Stapleton, one of the 2018 walkout organizers, was encouraged to take leave,
and Timnit Gebru, a lead researcher on Google’s Ethical AI team, was
encouraged to seek mental health care before being forced out.

I resisted. How would being alone by myself all day, apart from my colleagues,
friends and support system, possibly help? And I feared that if I stepped away,
the company wouldn’t continue the investigation.
Eventually, the investigators corroborated my claims and found my tech lead
violated the Code of Conduct and the policy against harassment. My harasser
still sat next to me. My manager told me H.R. wouldn’t even make him change
his desk, let alone work from home or go on leave. He also told me that my
harasser received a consequence that was severe and that I would feel better if I
could know what it was, but it sure seemed like nothing happened.

The aftermath of speaking up had broken me down. It dredged up the betrayals

of my past that I’d gone into tech trying to overcome. I’d made myself
vulnerable to my manager and the investigators but felt I got nothing solid in
return. I was constantly on edge from seeing my harasser in the hallways and at
the cafes. When people came up behind my desk, I startled more and more
easily, my scream echoing across the open-floor-plan office. I worried I’d get a
poor performance review, ruining my upward trajectory and setting my career
back even further.

I went weeks without sleeping through the night.

I decided to take three months of paid leave. I feared that going on leave would
set me back for promotion in a place where almost everyone’s progress is public
and seen as a measure of an engineer’s worth and expertise. Like most of my
colleagues, I’d built my life around the company. It could so easily be taken
away. People on leave weren’t supposed to enter the office — where I went to the
gym and had my entire social life.

Fortunately, I still had a job when I got back. If anything, I was more eager than
ever to excel, to make up for lost time. I was able to earn a very high
performance rating — my second in a row. But it seemed clear I would not be a
candidate for promotion. After my leave, the manager I loved started treating
me as fragile. He tried to analyze me, suggesting that I drank too much caffeine,
didn’t sleep enough or needed more cardiovascular exercise. Speaking out
irreparably damaged one of my most treasured relationships. Six months after
my return, when I broached the subject of promotion, he told me, “People in
wood houses shouldn’t light matches.”

When I didn’t get a promotion, some of my stock grants ran out and so I
effectively took a big pay cut. Nevertheless, I wanted to stay at Google. I still
believed, despite everything, that Google was the best company in the world.
Now I see that my judgment was clouded, but after years of idolizing my
workplace, I couldn’t imagine life beyond its walls.

So I interviewed with and got offers from two other top tech companies, hoping
that Google would match. In response, Google offered me slightly more money
than I was making, but it was still significantly less than my competing offers. I
was told that the Google finance office calculated what I was worth to the
company. I couldn’t help thinking that this calculus included the complaint I’d
filed and the time I’d taken off as a consequence.

I felt I had no choice but to leave, this time for good. Google’s meager
counteroffer was final proof that this job was just a job and that I’d be more
valued if I went elsewhere.
After I quit, I promised myself to never love a job again. Not in the way I loved
Google. Not with the devotion businesses wish to inspire when they provide for
employees’ most basic needs like food and health care and belonging. No
publicly traded company is a family. I fell for the fantasy that it could be.

So I took a role at a firm to which I felt no emotional attachment. I like my

colleagues, but I’ve never met them in person. I found my own doctor; I cook my
own food. My manager is 26 — too young for me to expect any parental warmth
from him. When people ask me how I feel about my new position, I shrug: It’s a
job.

Emi Nietfeld is a software engineer in New York City and the author of a
forthcoming memoir, “Acceptance.” She is working on a book about her time at
Google.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to
hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s
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A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2021, Section SR, Page 2 of
the New York edition with the headline: I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job
Again. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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benningtonlife commented May 6
B
benningtonlife
BrooklynMay 6
Times Pick
Ms. Nietfeld's essay is certainly powerful, and the pain, anger and dismay about how
she perceives she was treated is clear. It's her truth, and deserves to be heard. However,
it's her truth, and it's important to recognize it may not be "the" truth. Read her essay
again...yes, she lays out her case. But it's riddled with conjecture, projection,
incorporates trauma from childhood beyond the responsibility of her employer and hurls
accusation as fact in a confessional style to which Google, in its defense, has no
opportunity to respond. In the end, without balance, it's just a story. And to universally
lay her situation at the feet of "Google" seems disingenuous. As utopian as the idea is,
her expectation that everyone will march in lockstep with her vision of a perfect
workplace environment seems hopelessly naive. She's learning life lessons; the world
doesn't always bend to our ideals; our workplaces can't deliver perfection. That's a good
thing. It strengthens our spines, our focus and our resolve to make the world a better
place, and in the process propels us into adulthood. I wish her peace, and hope she
recaptures the joy and sense of family that working in a great workplace environment
can bring. That's an amazing thing, and thousands of companies outside Google, large
and small, provide that opportunity. Like all families, however, they're just not perfect.
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Rafael commented May 6
R
Rafael
BerlinMay 6
Times Pick
I worked at Google, Volkswagen, Uber, before I founded my own companies. A few
thoughts, also from the perspective of a company owner today with 1,000+ employees.
a) Obviously, Google has a problem with HR complaints. It's a big company. They need
to improve. It's bad for them. b) But aren't many things she describes a bit naive? Dream
employer? Manager as a father figure? She also barely worked there, starting in 2015. c)
So, there is a naive young woman, and then a co-worker behaves badly. An HR
complaint reveals a violation, and he is punished (which means in management that
chances are he will leave the company eventually). What else did you expect? Even if
you file this at court, almost nothing would happen, right? d) Finally, she goes public in
an international newspaper so that now everybody at Google is glad that she left
because it proves that this naive, junior co-worker seems to be a troublemaker that seeks
attention, even if everybody believes what she says. It's good that she realized that
Google is just a job. I'm receiving every now and then HR complaints like this. It
happens. Usually, it works like a court where you ask yourself whether the employee is
a repeater, and how serious the case is. I'm less tolerant in this regard, and as an owner,
my word has more weight, so we handle it differently. However, such cases happen,
usually to managers or old employees who are hiding their predatory behavior.
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