On almost being fired at Microsoft
Failure is normal, it will happen, embrace it and learn from it
Today, I am honored to have a level that only a small percentage of Google engineers reach. I’ve had a few successes that helped me get there. But I’ve also had some pretty spectacular and embarrassing failures in my career, and I’ve had a few rough patches where I was lost. This is a story about pursuing an opportunity that you are not passionate about, for the sake of the perceived value of it to your career. This is a story about biting off more than you can chew. This is my story of how I almost got fired.
I wanted to publish this story because I see a huge cultural stigma around failure. That causes a lot of engineers to believe that it’s not ok to fail, particularly more junior engineers. This crippling fear of failure can prevent us from taking bolder steps that could lead to leaps of innovation. I happen to believe that it’s only a matter of time before we encounter a significant failure in our professional career, and being scared of it is career-limiting. Generally the stories I publish are about something that I did that worked out well. But failures shaped me as a person more than those successes, so they deserve some real estate here too!
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My first four years at Microsoft were very positive, and I was rising quickly. I was promoted within 18 months. Two years later I was promoted again, this time to Lead Engineer. Microsoft had an awful assumption that good engineers made good managers, so as soon as you proved yourself for a few years you were encouraged to pursue a management role. I started with a little team of 3 fantastic engineers. We were all young and had seemingly endless amounts of time, energy and passion. We wrote all the tools to test the spell checkers and grammar checkers in Microsoft Office, for forty different languages. All those red and green squiggles you see in Word are my babies. We respected, trusted, and depended on each other. I was thriving. Life was good.
Yet Microsoft was facing a number of events that hindered its growth. First, in 1999, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust case that sucked the life out of the stock. Secondly, in 2000, the dot-com bubble burst was brutal to the entire software industry, and Microsoft survived but was badly affected. Thirdly, in 2001, the events of 9/11 affected the entire country. Towards the end of 2001, an executive order came to tighten up our belts. In the ensuing reorg, I lost my 3 engineers, and they all went to find new jobs within Microsoft.
Without engineers reporting to me, I was about to lose the “Lead” title, which I perceived as highly valuable. In retrospect, I wasn’t making any more money than I was without it, and I could have just as easily grown in my career as an individual contributor (which was the path I eventually chose, many years later) as I could have as a manager. But “Lead” sounded fancier in my resume. It had more prestige to me. Today I can see I was pursuing that for entirely the wrong reasons; back then, I was blissfully unaware of the bigger picture.
I had an opportunity to stay in the organization and continue to be a manager, but in a different part of the org. I chatted with the hiring manager and got a terrible vibe. In retrospect, it was clear from day one that we weren’t a good match for each other. The charter of the team was entirely uninteresting to me. I was the wrong guy for the job. All in all, there were a lot of red flags I should have seen. Nevertheless, in my naive viewpoint, it was the only way for me to keep the “title” in these hard times. So I took the job. I hated it as much as you might guess I was going to hate it. So I started to struggle.
At the same time, I had decided to pursue a Masters in Computer Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. I was doing that while I was working full time, which was quite challenging. I needed to have at least a B-average if I wanted Microsoft to reimburse me for tuition. But, most importantly, I wanted to do a PhD at Stanford, and I really needed to have straight As for that. So keeping a straight A average doing a Masters at the #5 school in the nation, while working full time, turned out to be challenging. I was definitely struggling there as well.
Thirdly, my personal life was a mess. Lots of personal drama there. I was struggling there as well.
I think it came down to being the perfect storm of career struggles, school struggles, and personal-life struggles. I was in trouble, and I didn’t even know it. I did poorly all across the board. And, unaccustomed to failure as I was, I was too proud to look at myself in the mirror and simply admit it and take a step back. I just kept plowing ahead, thinking I’ll just dig myself out of this with hard work and dedication. Sometimes, brute force isn’t enough. You need a strategy. I lacked one. What I should have done is had a candid discussion with my manager, admit I couldn’t handle everything, and step back from some of my work responsibilities. Or even taken some time off altogether to sort out my life a bit better.
I eventually did that, but it was too late. I had lost my manager’s trust, and I had lost my reports’ trust. Performance reviews came along, and as I was writing my self-review I was finally able to introspect into some of my poor choices. I wrote a brutally honest review. Later on, I learned that’s the only thing that saved me that year. My boss wanted to fire me, but when he read my review he appreciated that I was vocally self critical and thought maybe there was something to rescue there. Since Microsoft worked on a strict performance bell curve, I also had luck: I was the last person in the curve right of the “you’re getting fired” line. So very literally, the only reason I wasn’t fired is because somebody did worse than me. I got a “$0.00” yearly bonus, a “$0.00” raise, and no stock refreshers. I stared at my review numbers with a sharp pain: the extra “.00” seemed to be driving the point a little too hard: you had done so awful, it wasn’t just “0”, it was “0.00” to stress you didn’t even deserve a penny.
I had to step back from my leadership role and go back to being an individual contributor. That in itself wasn’t bad, although at the time it felt embarrassing, like everybody knew I wasn’t good enough. What was worse is that I had to go back to basics, to earn trust again. The following years were gray. It takes a long time to earn trust, but you can lose it in a very short period of time.
Some individuals in the team held this over my head for years. It really is hard to get a new start when you stay in the same place: people keep expecting you to be the same flawed person today as you were yesterday, even as you’re actively trying to better yourself. Part of me thinks I should have gone to an entirely different team (or company) where people treated me without any preconceived ideas. I’m sure those individuals would be shocked to see that I went on to becoming a Principal Engineer at Amazon and a Senior Staff Engineer at Google (in Microsoft levels, that’s going from Level 60 to Level 67, or 7 promotions, or roughly a promotion every other year once I figured myself out). They had given up on me. Everybody’s path is different, and mine included meandering for a while, until I figured out who I really was and how to be effective at what I did. It’s just what I had to do. Don’t give up on people!
As painful as this experience was, it deeply shaped who I eventually became as a leader, so I am thankful that I went through it. I learned that the world didn’t stop spinning, which made me less fearful of failure, and I started taking bigger, bolder risks in my life (some did not pay off, but some did and got me to where I am today). Failure is liberating! I learned that trust is a basic currency and so I focused heavily in transparency, accountability, and ways to build trust with others around me. And I learned some humility and empathy too — I worry about leaders who have never failed because the more successes they build, the cockier they become about their judgment. Lastly it made me more willing to give people the benefit of the doubt that they too, can evolve and become better.
All in all, that failure, as scary as it was, also was the best thing that happened to my career.
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