Google Director Looking Forward To Totally Chilling At Work
805 11th Ave, Sunnyvale, CA — Settling into a plush chair whilst holding an oat milk latte, Sasha Utkin looked forward to a relaxing day at work as a Director at Google. As she opened up a headcount planning spreadsheet, she marveled at how happy she was to take a break from home and go to work. “When I’m at home, I have to deal with three kids and a man-child husband,” she said as she took a sip of her latte. “But here, it’s a whole different story.”
Mrs. Utkin’s day begins with dropping her children off at school and commuting to work in a self driving Tesla Model X. She typically gets to work around 9 am, makes a beeline for a Google cafe, and orders a free drink from the barista. After one or two meetings, she enjoys a relaxed one-hour lunch at one of Google’s many luxurious reservation-only restaurants. In the afternoon, she sends some emails, absconds to the gym for a yoga class, and grabs coffee with some of her reports. At the end of the day, she takes a walk around her team’s floor to “motivate the troops” and then commutes home in her autonomous Tesla.
It’s not always easy to defend her lifestyle, but luckily Mrs. Utkin’s executive assistant Dana Rogers has resorted to clever tactics to protect her boss’s calendar. “Most people don’t respect ‘do not book’ calendar slots, especially if it’s a big 3 hour block at the beginning of the day. So I made her calendar private and booked a bunch of separate ‘do not books’ in half hour increments so anyone who looks at her calendar thinks that she’s in a bunch of important private meetings.”
Mrs. Utkin’s life wasn’t always so relaxed. When she was a Senior Manager, she spent most of her day hustling to keep her group running smoothly. However, as soon as she was promoted to Director, her lifestyle drastically changed.
“At home, I have a nanny to help with the younger kids, but it’s not like I can hire someone to deal with my eldest’s teenage rebellion. But at work, I have an EA and a team of 100 people that follow my every word.”
In one case, Mrs. Utkin made a comment off-hand that was overheard by her subordinate. After holding a war-room with exhortations that “Sasha wants this!”, Mrs. Utkin was surprised to see that the subordinate had prepared a full slide deck for her the next day. “You have to be careful what you say as a Director,” Mrs. Utkin told us. “I was just thinking out loud!”
Because Mrs. Utkin is a Director, her reports expect that she is so busy that she’s constantly away from her desk. However, she realized that this expectation meant she could leave her desk at any time of the day without arousing suspicion. “Sometimes I just put down a private event on my calendar, go to my conference room, and browse Pinterest for a while,” she said.
Despite her absenteeism, Mrs. Utkin’s group still runs smoothly. She has hired a head of strategy, a chief of staff, an executive assistant, a lead product manager, a communications assistant, an HR business partner, and a coterie of managers that handle day to day work so Mrs. Utkin can focus on higher level tasks like “setting direction” (reading blog posts in her conference room) and “communication” (getting a free massage at the gym together with another Director to ensure a good peer review). “The secret to management is hiring people who don’t need to be managed!” she told us. She expects that at this rate, she will get a “Meets Expectations” and a 10% bonus by default this half.
At press time, Mrs. Utkin was spotted in the free Google arcade playing Space Invaders with her VP. According to her calendar, she was engaged in a critical “Mentorship 1:1.”
