5 reasons I quit my $160k Google job and now drive for Uber
Exactly a year ago, I handed in my badge at arguably the world’s most desirable place to work (at least according to all those Forbes & USA News surveys), a place that has since become the world’s most valuable company (according to Wall Street). After nearly 5 years learning and growing as a professional, surrounded by some of the most impressive peers one could hope for, I was somehow not satisfied. There was objectively not much to complain about — great co-workers, obviously terrific (and free) food, strong leadership, and more than generous compensation. Yet that wasn’t enough. Something was missing. Before you jump to the classic millennials-are-spoiled-brats conclusion, bear with me just a few minutes.
First, I was by no means the first to reach this point (the average tenure at Google is well under 2 years). For those who do live in the Bay Area, you’re just as likely to know an ex-Googler now as a current employee. There are a few common themes that come up as motivations for leaving: the company is now too big with bureaucracy and politics getting in the way, they have a brilliant startup idea they want to pursue, or they’re bored and want to travel the world while they’re still young. For me, all of those typical reasons resonated to some degree. However, as I’ve now a had a full-year outside the bubble, I’d like to share my top five reasons why I left the big G, and why I’m now happier than ever and driving for Uber.
- People can pivot just as easily as startups can.
While the “pivot” in has been a popularized element of tech culture since at least 2010 (pop quiz: can you name Lyft’s original business before its major pivot?), I’ve come to the conclusion that people’s careers can benefit just as much from a pivot. Just as pivoting a startup became possible due to the low capital requirements of software products, the rapidly growing and evolving industry of career bootcamps is making the feasibility of a career pivot just as likely. Six months ago, I had never written a line of HTML or CSS, and couldn’t have begun to explain what GitHub is. I’d previously spent 5+ years mastering the arts of digital marketing and web analytics, and was a decent salesman. I could crunch anything in Excel, but reading code was out of the question. And yet today marks the fifth website I’ve built from scratch, thanks to my experience over the last six months. But it’s not just about coding. There are boot camps for designers, for product management, for digital marketing, even for fitness instructors (and no, I’m not referring to Barry’s). Far more so than the overhyped promises massive open online courses (MOOCs), I believe that boot camps have begun to and will continue to increase job satisfaction and employment outcomes for generations to come.
It’s reasonable to be skeptical. I was too. Even though a primary motivation for leaving Google was that I eventually wanted to found my own company, I didn’t think I could just decide to become an engineer. I figured I had closed that door when I decided to study political science in college. And so I instead joined Metromile as a growth analyst, where being at a smaller company working alongside engineers (whose code still looked like gibberish) made me yearn further for the magic powers of a software engineer. So in September 2015, I completed my pivot, said goodbye to my steady paycheck, and enrolled in Dev Bootcamp.
When my girlfriend and I began dating 5 years ago, I recall telling her I had no idea what I wanted to be doing and 5 years from now. But now I’m okay with that. In fact, I kind of hope I never know what I’m going to be doing 5 years from now. When it’s possibly to pivot careers in a matter of months, the prospect of doing the same thing for the rest of my life sounds like torture.
2. Work-life flexibility is even more valuable than balance.
As most are aware, working at Google is not like consulting or investment banking (and also doesn’t pay quite nearly as well). Google leadership as long embraced the idea of work-life-balance. The free food, the shuttle buses, the on-campus childcare and laundry service — it all exists to lessen the headaches of everyday life. And while some teams at Google work harder than others (hint: salespeople are rarely putting in 50+ hours/week), the caliber of individuals at Google aren’t the type to slack off either.
I worked as an analyst in Large Customer Sales, primarily with retailers who competed with Amazon. My typical day began at 8:30am (when I showed up for breakfast), and ended between 5pm and 6pm. I surely cannot claim that I was “overworked.” But at the same time, my time was spoken for 5 days a week from at least 10am to 4pm. Since being freed of those constraints, I still work about 50 hours a week, but 100% on my own terms. If a huge snow storm blows through Tahoe and drops 4 feet of snow on a Monday, I can decide to be in Tahoe Tuesday morning. If there’s cheap tickets to an afternoon Giant’s game, I can buy the tickets an hour before game time and just head over. Plan to get a few hours of coding or driving in later that evening. It is this pure flexibility of freelancing that attracts so many people today. For me, it allowed me to ski 32 days this season across 6 states, with the majority of those days coming midweek. And for anyone who’s experienced Squaw valley lines on a weekend pow day, you really ought to give midweek a try.
3. A six figure salary does not mean financial freedom.
We live in a world where money has value. No one can deny that. However, few would also deny that things like the flexibility to spend time with family or pursuing your passions also have intrinsic value. As an analyst for many years, you legitimately say that I loved making spreadsheets. And I did love spreadsheets far more than I loved Adwords. In fact, one day I built a spreadsheet of my current income, savings, and investments, and projected when I would be able to retire. At the risk of sounding tone deaf, I wasn’t exactly thrilled when it spit out that I could retire at age 49 with my wife and two kids. But I’d have to be willing to stay at Google for 27 years.
(I know, I see you judging me: many would be thrilled to retire before 50). When you’ve been in the same role for 3 years and are already itching for something new, the prospect of another quarter-century is incomprehensible.
Instead, in the year since leaving Google, I’ve realized that my expenses can actually be dramatically lower (I now live on $3,000 a month) without sacrificing my quality of life. My prospects of reaching financial freedom have actually improved despite my smaller income. When I first estimated my “runway” while preparing to leave my last corporate job at Metromile, I calculated that my $80,000 of savings would be enough to last me just about a year. Instead, 6 months later, I look at my accounts and calculate that I have at least 2 more years of runway, should I need it. More importantly, my “magic number” of the assets I’ll need to comfortably retire and declare financial freedom, has fallen in half. While I may have read the Gallup researchyears ago that income above $75,000 doesn’t actually produce higher quality of life, I didn’t truly understand it until experiencing it first hand.
4. You can actually earn a (modest) living wage in the sharing economy.
To be fully honest, I never expected I would drive regularly for Uber. When I first signed up as a driver, it was explicitly just as market-research experiment. I was still working at Metromile, and my team was actively marketing to Uber drivers who might switch to Metromile for their car insurance. As such, I simply wanted to better understand the perspective of Uber drivers, in order to sell them insurance. The biggest hurdle in that process was simply confronting my own pride. Having used countless services like Uber, Lyft, Caviar, Door Dash, and HomeJoy as a consumer, I loved them. As a consumer. As a prototypical tech yuppie with disposable income, and I’d never thought twice about what it was like to be on the other end of coin. Preparing for my first rides, I was forced to confront my own subconscious assumptions about Uber drivers — that they are low-income, uneducated, and must not have any other job prospects. Part of me is still guilty for harboring those assumptions, because they couldn’t be further from the truth.
I have also come to realize that it is very much possible to earn a living wage as a freelancer in the sharing economy. I’d always been skeptical of the headlines purporting that full-time drivers could make as much as $90,000 per year. But now having driven part-time for six months, I don’t see that as unreasonable. It is by all means constantly getting harder for drivers to maintain those high earnings when fare prices keep falling, but it is still possible. As a quick preview, in a future post I’ll explain how I managed to make $75/hr last week while driving just 16 hours (yes, that’s the equivalent of $150k if I were driving full-time). Be sure to subscribe for updates and stay tuned.
5. The sharing economy is fun (and great for doing informal market research).
Finally, while I admit I did not expect driving for Uber or Lyft to be fun when I first made the decision to quit, it is one of the primary reasons I keep doing it. As a natural extrovert, I realized one of the things I missed most about my old job was the social interaction in the office. As a driver, while you may not strike up conversation with all of your passengers, I guarantee you will get far more social interaction than working out of a coffee shop, let alone holing up in your home office. Additionally, if you happen to be working on other side projects like I am, your typical rideshare passenger is more than happy to weigh-in with feedback on your latest prototype. Many well-founded startups are willing to pay UX researcher’s thousands of dollars to meet with and interview a dozen users over the course of a week. In contrast, I can spend 6 hours of driving and have just as many quality conversations, making a few hundred dollars in the process! As such, if you’re so lucky to be a passenger of mine in the coming weeks, there’s a good chance I may pick your brains on Citizen Debate, a new platform for civilized political debate.
Gig of the week: Uber
To conclude this first post, let me first say thank you reading. Every week, I plan to publish a new article detailing some part of my freelancing journey toward financial freedom. At the end of each post, I will highlight a sharing economy gig that I’ve both used myself and can wholeheartedly vouch for. As you’re probably aware, almost all of these companies employ a marketing strategy known as the two-sided referral. It was first popularized by DropBox in 2010, and has been repeated more times than Donald Trump has used the word “HUUUGE.” It’s pretty simple, when you sign up with the referral code, both the referral and the referrer get a promotional bonus. Such as $1,000 cash (not joking).
If you feel so inclined, I encourage you to use sign up with my referral code. No pressure. If you have close friends already using that service, you should by all means ask them for their code, and I’m sure you’ll make their day. If you do choose to use any of my referral link, there are a few additional benefits. First, as a thank you for supporting my blog and my own freelance efforts, I will give you back 25% of my portion of the referral (so with the current $1,000 Uber promotion, that’s an extra $250). Additionally, because there are far more people out there who haven’t grown up with the privileges you and I have likely enjoyed, I will donate an additional 25% of my refferal bonus to a charity of your choosing. For more details, check out the how it works page from the main nav bar. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel to reach out to me directly at sharetheeconomy@gmail.com.
This week’s gig should not need much explanation. Uber is the most popular ridesharing app in the world. By some estimates there are more than a million drivers globally. If you’ve never heard of it, I honestly don’t believe you. I’ve now been driving regularly for almost six months, and have no plans to stop. It was my very first experience as a freelancer in the sharing economy, and would recommend everyone give it a try. Depending on where you’re coming from, signing up to drive may involve swallowing some pride. It did for me, and I can say it was 100% worth it.