work

I’ll never forget the last meal I had at Linkedin.

Take a moment and visualize (hungrily) with me…

Blue Cornbread Waffles + Maple Whipped Butter + Fried Chicken with Rosemary, smoldered in sweet Maple Syrup. It was the best Chicken Waffles I ever had.

But wait! I still had to drain down this masterpiece. I grabbed my cup of strawberry mint, from-the-tap Kombucha and slowly sipped down the bubbly, sweet tasting liquid.

Perfection.

This may have been my last meal, but it painted a vivid picture of the shielded, and admittedly, confused life I’ve been living the past 14 months between my employment at Linkedin and Google.

But today, along with all future chicken & waffle consumption, it ended. I’m leaving the world of Big Tech, Big Brand companies for a smaller recruiting agency. I’ll be Employee #14. And I couldn’t be happier.

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It still feels a little odd being associated with the word Google. It’s a word that you see not only in your modern dictionaries, but also across the web, the news, and in a holistic point of view, the world. It’s a word that when mixed with terms like work, colleagues, and future, can produce some really unexpected expectations.

Here are a few observations that I gathered during my first week here.

Have you ever had a dream that was cut too short? A dream that you wished lasted just a little longer so that you could squeeze every ounce of its magical powers out before having to face life’s realities? Enter, Google.

The first day was the best. From jumping on a conference bike, (see picture, use imagination), eating ribs, seeing the iconic T-Rex and Slide, and just allowing my sensors to be overloaded, I felt like I was at an adult Disneyland. There’s a special aura that fills the air that is filled by happy employees, (like, everyone is happy here, smiles on smiles on smiles) and a surge of intelligence that is both awesomely inspiring as well as intimidating.

It was fascinating to see the direct correlation between all the perks and amenities that Google provides for its employees and the productivity that followed. It’s a simple formula really. If your workers are happy and their basic needs of health and nourishment are provided, more time and more energy can be maximized into keeping the Google engine running.

The employees here, as well as my colleagues all think on a faster, efficiency-driven track which proved to be a bit dispelling for me at first. It’s not easy being “smart.” During these past few months prior to hearing about Google, I had not done a good job in exercising my brain. My life was on autopilot. I was focusing too much on physical rewards and avoided opportunities to challenge my mental and cognitive state of mind. There’s a switch that needs to be turned on in your brain when you step into onto the Google campus. It’s a choice to think quicker just like it’s a choice to be lazy and succumb to complacency.

I’m a work in progress. I will probably never reach the same level of natural intellect as many of the employees here, but at least I’ll be one step closer. And just like being culturally immersed in a country is the best way to learn a language, I believe being surrounded constantly by the world’s best will and hopefully do wonders to the way I think and learn.

The people here will be my greatest asset. It’s just a manner of exposing myself now and being bold to initiate conversations to those around me. I need to remind myself that at the end of the day, beneath all those layers of genius and Googley-ness, people are simply, just people.

That’s all for now, more posts to come.

Cheers,

Albert