Anti-climax

Last week I spent the week in San Francisco and Mountain View. On Monday and Tuesday I attended BlinkOn, the conference held for people contributing to Blink, which is the engine that powers Chromium. There, I met a lot of folks I work with (or converse with in spec issues) in person for the very first time. We had some good conversations – conversations I typically don’t have as a fully remote employee.

At the conference I also gave a presentation on CSS Parser Extensions, a wild idea I have to fix CSS polyfilling once and for all. It was great to see nods of approval bot from fellow Googlers but also people from Microsoft and other venues as I was giving my presentation.

~

On Wednesday and Thursday I attended an engineering team onsite in the San Francisco offices. Because Adam, Una, and I closely collaborate with those engineering teams, we were also invited. Adam and I attended in person, and Una (just back from maternity leave) remotely.

The atmosphere was great as we discussed a lot of things. Scrolling papercuts, address bars, gestures, physics, navigation models, … ideas were bouncing off the walls and the creative juices were flowing. Adam even nerdsniped me into hacking a clip-path clipping solution for View Transitions (still WIP).

On Thursday evening we also had a team dinner on cruise in the bay itself. Our phones remained tucked away in our bags, as there still was so much to talk about with our friends from engineering.

~

Riding high on 4 days of nothing but good vibes, our ways parted. As I was driving my rental car out of the parking garage to get back to my hotel, Adam called me on my phone. He asked about getting a message from a colleague of ours, which said how sorry they felt for Adam. Adam was like “Man, did I just get fired and don’t know it yet?”. Uhm?!

As we hung up, I suggested Adam to check his corp email. We had caught some wind about a reorg happening while at the dinner cruise, but surely this must be a mistake, right? A few minutes later Adam called back and suddenly things got real very quickly: Adam’s role had been terminated (as well as 4 other people from our DevRel team).

I parked the car and headed back to Adam’s hotel where we, together with vmpstr and flackr from engineering who we closely work with, just sat there at the table listening to Adam vent, holding back his tears.

~

I’m currently on Hawaii taking a (long planned) vacation. I’ve been here for two full days now, yet can’t stop thinking about what happened to Adam.

As I shared on social media Adam is the brightest, most authentic, deeply passionate, extremely inspiring, funniest, and nicest person I have ever worked with. He poored his heart and soul into his job with one goal: to make the web as a whole a better place. He was a key person working on key projects … but apparently even that is not enough. A snap of the fingers and it’s game over for Adam as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer.

I get it that companies need to save money and that underperforming people can get fired. But the quarterly earnings speak differently and Adam certainly was not underforming. Not knowing the true reason why they chose him over other people at the company is putting a lot of pressure on our team. Not only do we now need to try to pick up the pieces caused by this poor decision making, we are also constantly living with the fear that today might have been our last in this role.

~

I will miss Adam. Not only as a colleague but also as a friend. Silver lining in all this, maybe, is that I was there with Adam when he got the news, lending my ear, offering my support, and sharing emotions while grabbing a beer. I hope that when the day comes when I get booted, I too will have a friend standing next to me.

Take care bud, I’m sure there’s a bright future ahead of you, even though you might not see it now.