What I Have Learnt About Myself In My First Year at Google

It Is Not All About One Thing in Particular but About Everything at Once: Be Open, Plan Your Career, Do Not Ignore Your Strengths or Peers

5 min readJul 7, 2024

As I progress through my second year at Google (as of 2024), I have found that each year brings unexpected changes and invaluable experiences. Rather than delving into exhaustive details, I will concentrate on the key lessons learned during my first year:

Be open to doing any type of work to succeed
Plan for your career iteratively
Do not ignore your passions
People matter more than your work items

Generated by Google Gemini

About Me

For a bit of context, I am originally from Romania, I studied Computer Science at the University of Manchester (UK) until 2017 and finished a part-time Business Analytics at the University of Bath (you can read about it here). I previously worked for Morgan Stanley as a software engineer for nearly five years before moving to Google (UK — 2022) and subsequently to Google US (2024) in New York where I work currently as a software engineer.

My Initial Role at Google

For a deep dive into what my role entailed, feel free to click into my previous article Life as a Technical non-software-engineer at Google in gTech gPS. Safe to say it was a role that took me out of my comfort zone (programming) quite a bit and forced me to understand a part of enterprise business that I had not delved into before.

Be Open to Doing Any Work To Succeed

Expose yourself to more diverse opportunities than you would be comfortable with if you had it your way. This allows you to identify what are the things you might enjoy doing or are good at that you might have otherwise never found out about.

Some projects take advantage of your innate abilities and some require you to learn skills that perhaps you will never use again. The latter can be a downer since you might feel you would be able to have so much more impact if only the universe would give you work that aligns with your passion skills of choice.

The reality is that life is tough and sometimes you have to be as effective, if not more effective, at doing something you like as you would be at doing something you do enjoy. This is what can distinguish you as a senior contributor and help you gain a lot of respect from peers and higher-ups. If you do not enjoy working on your current project, then it is likely no one else would particularly enjoy doing it either. However, someone has to get this work done, and if you will be the one to deliver on it and have a success story to top it off then it might contribute to your growth more than someone who was able to spend their nights working on a project that aligns with their passions but does not quite align to business priorities (real example from my own experience).

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Plan for Your Career Iteratively

Personal development plan. Education. Side-projects. Keep learning.

It is during this year that I got exposure to and developed more of an attention span for my career and for investing more time into understanding where I am both personally professionally, and what direction I want to head towards. This is an alternative to letting things just happen to you, going through the daily motions rather than having a long-term intent and plan. It is you who has your best interest at heart and no one but yourself owes you to make the best decision for yourself.

I speak in length about Personal Development Plans in this other article you can check.

Do Not Ignore Your Passions

Whilst openness to learning new things and applying yourself differently is of high value, the case remains that when you are already really good at something, it is likely you might be able to find a way to leverage your abilities in this new challenging situation you have gotten yourself into.

Some examples of this could be if you have some programming experience, you might be able to automate a lot of work that peers might not consider automating. But it still requires you to bite the bullet and put that initial time investment to set things up for automation, which may or may not pay off, but is likely to be highly beneficial in the long-term and potentially incur cost savings across your entire team or department.

People Matter More Than Your Work Items

Last, but perhaps most importantly, I have learnt more than ever before that whilst you might be able to have a significant impact individually, you are very likely missing out on applying a multiplier to the value you can bring to yourself and the company by not engaging productively with others. By saying productively I am not referring solely from a technical standpoint of collaborating with others to accomplish your work items. I mean socializing, understanding the challenges others have and approaches others take, and figuring out how you might be able to solve not only your problems but those of the group you are part of.

The people around you are the ones making everything happen and the only reason the company you are in is as successful as it is is because of all the contributions many people have made together as a group.

Closing Remarks

To sum it up, in my first year I believe I learnt, more than ever before, to stay open to new experiences while still leveraging my strengths and focusing on where I want to go long-term, and, finally, keep reminding myself this is not a single-player game but an experience which we all contribute equally for a better outcome overall.

If you like this content, check out my article on How To Not Be a Run-of-the-Mill Software Engineer.

Dear Reader,

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