I ate a HUGE slice of humble pie at Google
Taking risks and failing catapulted his career
In an alternate life, I would have been in academia — that was the path that I was on, with a PhD and Post doc. When my PhD supervisor moved to Google, I took notice of this alternate path. I still remember his words —
“I feel reborn, really — it is incredible!”
Soon after, I moved to Google — feeling excited, and terrified at the same time. 3 lessons in my tenure at Google stand out as life changing — I’d like to share how these have made me who I am today.
Lesson 1 — Life is short
Within a couple of months of joining — I realized I was not a good fit for the project I was on. I had no expertise in the project, and I was not able to use my background in any way.
I was unmotivated, and I felt like a failure —
so I decided to pitch a new project to my leadership team. With enough people interested in my idea, we slowly gained momentum. My director supported this initiative, and asked me and two more senior engineers to move it forward. I risked disappointing a team I had just joined by jumping into something new which would be harder than I thought. But, like my PhD supervisor, I felt liberated and soon was on a path to success. I was able to bring something unique (my background), and show initiative to solve impactful problems.
Making the decision to try something new changed my entire career. Since that moment, I have always worked on projects which I started, or were at a very early phase. Lesson learnt:
life is too short to work on problems where I am unable to bring something unique to the table.
Lesson 2 — Trust is hard won and easily lost
3 years after I discovered that I should take initiative and only work on problems that suit me, I found myself in a completely different state —
I had already proven myself and operated with credibility and high confidence in my ability to execute.
Things were going well. I was in a remote office working on a highly impactful project with a small team (which I had initiated). Soon after it launched, there was a lot of recognition and great user adoption. By pulling something off with a very small team, I started to believe even more in myself and my abilities.
However, it made me arrogant. I assumed my role was critical to the project and I started to ignore all feedback.
More importantly, my attitude didn’t help me to build many bridges to the larger team. I didn’t make an effort to travel or meet people face to face. I felt my work spoke for itself — and that was enough. Soon enough, I realized that it wasn’t.
People in the larger team felt the project was too critical to have me lead as I was perceived as un-collaborative.
Then I was asked to transfer the project to another team in Mountain View. I had to give up what I had started and it rattled me — I was forced to look deeply at my own behavior. After a few weeks of reflection, I realized that working hard and delivering results are not enough.
One has to remain humble, open, and collaborative.
Building relationships over video conferencing or code reviews was insufficient — trust is built slowly and can be lost in an instant. This second lesson changed me at fundamental level. On reading Adam Grant’s Give and Take, I internalized the importance of building success for everyone and enabling others.
Lesson 3 — Failure builds character
A few years later, I was working on a fast growing project creating a product from scratch. The overall project areas went from tens of people to several hundred. After a few hectic months, my project was re-orged and transferred to Mountain View. I followed the project and myself moved to Mountain View, where I began to rebuild the team again.
The entire team operated as a startup within Google — we had lots of ideas; we wanted to achieve something big and we put in blood, sweat and tears.
Surely that would lead to success, right? We had talent, solid leadership, and support from the highest levels in the company. Surely THAT would lead to success, right? False. 18 months into the project, it became clear that our product wasn’t working. Team morale plummeted. People became skeptical about ideas, and then, of course, there were re-orgs.
We tried everything but no results came. People started to leave in a trickle, and then in one quarter, I lost half my team.
At first, I tried to keep them but soon realized that helping them start fresh was the right move for them and for me as a manager.
The project died and I moved on.
What is there to learn from a spectacular failure? The answer: everything!
- an idea can fail despite tremendous effort and energy
- you learn more in failure than you do in success and
- as a leader, I NEEDED to experience failure in order to grow — leadership in failure builds character.
There have been many trials and tribulations in my career; things that have tested my leadership, my judgment and my ability to persevere. Through it all, I have learned from my mistakes and have ultimately built a successful career at Google. There’s no doubt that without the lessons I’ve shared, I would not have made it this far.
Bhaskar is a Tech Executive at Google, currently a Principal Engineer/Director of Engineering at Google. His work has touched countless critical projects from Gmail Spam to location history and location quality. He was recognized with Great Manager Award in 2015. Bhaskar holds a PhD in Machine Learning and Recommender Systems, and B.Tech and M.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi.
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