Googler... ex-Googler

Check out the book called "The Gervais Principle" which develops this kind of cynical approach to a significant depth.

That sentence caught my eye too.

First thought was whether they meant corporate political capitol transactional relationships.

Second thought was maybe they meant that, inevitably (or so it seems, probably thinking depressed), they'd drift apart, since everyone's busy with family and work, and around the workplace was the only times they'd have to interact.

In the latter, even if you have beyond-work social relationships, the opportunities to interact outside of work and the lunchtime might tend to be like "drinks after work", and effectively disappear as well. If that was your mode while working together, that's fine, and probably you don't want to see even more of each other then. That doesn't mean you weren't seeing them as people beyond coworkers. So, once no longer working with each other, you both need to actively change things to make opportunities to interact.

> This person apparently had a great time working this job and I imagine it’s difficult to end up with the responsibilities they had without being intrinsically motivated.

I think you can have a great time and build good relationships with teammates while still realizing you are a cog in the machine.

The way author writes the blog, you'd think they were working on the first Moon flight or the Manhattan project, whereas the reality is they were working on some CSS spec at Google, which tens of thousands of other people have been doing for probably 2 decades now.

It's routine maintenance work on existing stuff.

I experienced something similar at Nokia around the time things were starting to go bad (due to competition from Google and Apple). I got caught up in one of the earlier layoff rounds. As I've been able to reconstruct since then what happened was roughly that:

- I got a excellent performance review and a small raise. All good, keep on doing what you are doing! I was pretty happy.

- Nokia started to prepare for layoffs and gave units targets for numbers of people to lay off and amounts of money to save. They tried to spread the pain.

- Because of my team's multi site setup the choice came down to cutting at one of two sites. They picked my site. Management was concentrated at the other site.

- Because I was at the higher end of the spectrum in terms of salary, I was one of the natural choices for laying off. This was just done based on the numbers and had nothing to do with performance.

So, my bosses boss flew over to give us the news and that was it. Nokia was pretty nice about it. I was put on immediate gardening leave, I got the usual severance payment based on time served, and a decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant.

Since things were chaotic, other teams in the same site were still hiring new people with roughly the same qualifications. I was actually bucketed in with a project I wasn't even a part of. That whole project got shut down and apparently it was convenient to pretend I was working on that just so they could avoid firing other people in different parts of the organization. Somebody had to solve a big puzzle and I was a piece that fit in the right place. It wasn't personal.

In retrospect, one of the best things Nokia could do for me was firing me. I was coasting and the whole thing forced me to rethink what I was doing. If you are late thirties and a bit comfortable in your job, you might want to make a move. Or at least think about what you would do if you were forced to suddenly.

Lesson learned: job security is an illusion and employment relations are business relations. Don't take it personal. These things happen. Part of a high salary is insuring yourself against this kind of stuff and dealing with it when it happens. Part of the job.

> Under those conditions, why should I - or anyone - do any more than the minimum necessary to not get fired for cause?

No, you shouldn't. I know it feels like "but I thought that if I like cleaning my own apartment then getting a job as a janitor would leave me deeply fulfilled" but that's not how it works.