Well, I didn’t know the rest of the team at all, so I figured I’d go around meeting folks and offer to help with anything they needed. I’d grab a seat and draw some ui, or and icon, or rattle off thoughts. Whatever they needed.
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I got to know a few people, but most importantly I got to know what they were working on, and it wasn’t pretty. Everything being produced felt disjointed or siloed. Not part of the whole. The M.O. was build and copy as much shit as possible. “Win the race.”
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There was a distinct lack of a grand vision.
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None of it had been made with the consideration of all the products in the Google ecosystem. Just a bunch of “UX designers” not caring about the actual customer experience. Just focusing on their silos because that's how you complete tasks and play the game.
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It’s now November and I’m tasked with designing the opt-in UI, and parts of the functional UI for facial recognition in photos. That was about a week worth of work. FB copied some of my visuals on this, but whatevs our whole platform was a ripoff of theirs.

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I went back to knocking things out for other people. Designed some community branding, did a sweater design for SWSX, drew some visuals for people. The entire time I was also noodling about the disparate stuff I was seeing.
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I think it was around this time that Chuck, my manager who wouldn’t micro-manage but pumped you up and encouraged you to shoot for the moon (I truly liked him), got replaced by a guy that he was managing. An awfully bad designer with a love for bureaucracy.
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Let’s call him Greg because his real name is just as vanilla. He was a smarmy, politically motivated little fella who had no intentions of ever leaving Google. He told me that. I didn’t like him from the moment I met him and the feeling was mutual.
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Replying to @mwichary @morganknutson
I image ”Greg” being a similar to this creature somehow.pic.twitter.com/J58KTpUFDl
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I’ll tell you more in person. Not necessarily to hate on the guy; it’s just an interesting (and sad) case study of career priorities and allegiances. Made me think a lot about who I want to be – and not to be.
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