I just got my first annual performance review at Google. Outstanding Impact, which means top 27% of all engineers at my level!
The timing is bittersweet. I switched teams in January to move back to NYC, so this review covers my entire year on the ads team in Cambridge. My old manager wrote it. I genuinely miss working with him and that whole team. He was a great person and I legitimately enjoyed showing up to work every day because of the people around me. It makes the review hit different knowing it's kind of a goodbye letter from a chapter that's already closed.
The review process at Google is thorough. Your manager evaluates your work, your peers write feedback about you, and it all gets calibrated against everyone else at your level across the company. It goes beyond just "did you ship stuff." It's about impact, independence, how you handle ambiguity, how you help the people around you.
My manager's assessment said I'd "ramped up contributions considerably" and "grown more comfortable jumping into unfamiliar territory." He also said I'm on track for promotion in upcoming cycles, which is wild to hear less than a year in.
But the peer feedback is what really got me. One of my colleagues wrote that I was "a leader within the team in efforts to adopt AI tools to improve developer velocity and automate drudgery-prone tasks," and that I'd done this "almost entirely at my own initiative, to a degree that's unusual to see from a new engineer."
I read that sitting at my desk in Somerville and just stared at it for a while. Three years ago I was learning what a for loop was. Now a senior engineer at Google is calling my work unusual for my level. In a good way!
The thing is, I don't think my technical skills are anything special compared to engineers who've been doing this since college. What I think I bring is a different kind of drive. When you've stood in front of a class of thirty kids who don't want to be there and you have to make them care about music theory, you learn how to push through resistance. You learn how to explain things. You learn how to take ownership of a room. Those skills transfer in ways I never expected.
I also think the career change thing gives you a chip on your shoulder that never fully goes away. I'm always trying to prove I belong here. Maybe that's unhealthy, maybe it's fuel. Probably both.
Anyway. Outstanding Impact. Top 27%. The band teacher did alright!