I Quit Google After 10 Years and Moved From California to Austin

• In 2011, just after two many years at Oracle, Jian Jiao started out working at Google as an apps engineer.
• More than 10 a long time, he labored his way up to an engineering management position. Then in 2021, he quit.
• This is Jiao’s tale of his time at Google and why he still left to do the job for BP, as told to Kiera Fields.

This as-instructed-to essay is based mostly on a conversation with Jian Jiao, the principal details engineer at BP, in Austin, Texas, who still left his career at Google after 10 several years. This text has been edited for size and clarity.

I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2008 with a master’s degree in data systems management. I was studying how to use information to make management techniques for businesses. 

I did not understand the internship I did at the computer software enterprise Oracle would rapidly-track me to a tenure at Google.

After completing my degree, Oracle offered me an applications-engineer job in its Bay Spot workplace. I worked there for two years.

My tech direct at Oracle remaining in 2011 to start out a new crew at Google and asked me to be part of. He released me to Google’s selecting manager, and I submitted my application. 

Having the offer you to operate at Google was a desire for engineers. The Bay Region campus was like a playground.

I began as an application engineer at Google in March 2011. The initial Monday we got to the campus, we had orientation. Somebody in the human-sources department described to us new joiners that it was extra probable for anyone to get in a aircraft crash or be approved to Harvard than to get a job at Google. 

In the early days, I started out between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. and had breakfast at the business. I worked on cell and company purposes of data at the Google facts centre. 

I used my mornings coding with other builders. I might get lunch on campus, function until finally 4 p.m., go to the health club, and then function until eventually meal, which I’d get on campus just before heading home. 

When I became a supervisor, I took meetings remotely although driving to work. I would not have time to get breakfast. In my mornings, I reviewed models and code, then I had a crew conference. 

Jogging a team at Google is like working a startup. It truly is your work to preserve the sensible people on your group enthusiastic and engaged.

I would get my crew to a food items truck on campus for lunch, and then I would have conferences with the stakeholders of what ever job we had been doing the job on.

In July 2021, my family members experienced to relocate from the Bay Location to Austin.

In Austin, I was likely to direct another program-engineering team in Google’s lawful-infrastructure section. I might been performing at Google for 10 yrs and hadn’t considered leaving. 

I experienced seen a snapshot of the entire

technological innovation marketplace

and how it had progressed around a ten years. I watched the business increase from 30,000 workers to more than 100,000.

I noticed Google advance from a “nerd” firm that only cared about the velocity of its research effects to a corporation obsessed with person knowledge. I saw our aim change to mobile, then the cloud, then device learning. 

The lifestyle also changed from working like a startup to getting a main company. There was a lot more framework and a greater concentrate on efficiency. I didn’t locate this to be a favourable or destructive adjust, just a needed just one. 

Although I was waiting to relocate to Austin, a supervisor at BP attained out. 

She was searching for another person to lead BP’s details-engineering workforce. I mentioned, “I feel you’ve got got the incorrect particular person,” due to the fact I only knew Google’s technologies and practically nothing about the oil and gas marketplace. 

But she was honest, and I experienced spare time, so I spoke with the woman who would develop into my supervisor. At BP, she is the VP of info and analytics, and she beforehand remaining her director position at Uber just after six many years there.

She persuaded me to job interview. The job interview was done by a former Googler who had also worked at Tesla and an additional BP worker who was as soon as high up at Microsoft. 

I imagined, “What are all these innovators executing at an oil company?” 

Throughout my career, I’ve only cared about two things: Whom I get the job done with and what I function on. I could see there were being individuals at BP whom I could learn from, but I necessary to know what I’d be doing work on. 

I was instructed that to reinvent BP into a 21st-century integrated electrical power enterprise, it necessary electronic talent to produce new units, new society, and new function techniques, and even to style and design new tech.

At Google, I labored on highly developed technological innovation surrounded by persons who ended up totally aligned with my aims and complex know-how. I was relaxed. 

BP gave me the option to have a a great deal even bigger result by taking a enterprise into a new, far more sustainable period. 

Leaving Google was more durable than I envisioned. Was I actually heading to walk absent from terrific pay, superior inventory choices, absolutely free foods, a supercool business, and a single of the finest tech corporations in the environment to join an oil business? 

Indeed, I was. 

I felt like I couldn’t see the actuality of what technological innovation looked like from exterior the walls of Google. Getting able to see how corporations use technological know-how from a various stage of view is vital to advancing as an engineer. 

I needed to depart the Google bubble.

BP was a tradition shock in quite a few techniques. At Google, everybody worked the same way, subsequent agile operate to optimize productivity. But it was a harsher, a lot more competitive environment. 

BP is a great deal friendlier and much more men and women-oriented, but component of my task is to aid BP adapt to the new electronic marketplace. I have had resistance toward bringing in agile operating.

Folks request me if I struggle performing in this kind of a distinctive natural environment, but I see it as an option. Resistance can make you consider critically about the way you function and the work you happen to be carrying out.

At BP, I get to see how technology can be applied to electrical-automobile charging and bio fuels — perception into areas I would in no way have touched in a purely IT organization like Google. 

I value how my new work challenges me. I have developed extra than I would have if I experienced stayed at Google, and because of that I’m grateful for making the alter.