I just want to preface this by saying that I have no problem with brutally honest feedback. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who puts his craft above his ego. In fact, as I’ve already mentioned, I make a habit of uploading my work to online communities of credible experts and actively soliciting criticism. What does irk me, though, is when people who have no idea what they’re doing dismiss my work without engaging with it.
The morning after my run-in with Jessica, I waited outside my boss’s office for an important meeting. This was four days after our head of research, Alan, quit to go teach high school math in his hometown of Toledo. So now the position was open and I was, by any standard, his clear successor.
My boss, Lucas, was the junior VP overseeing the tiny twenty-person division of General Motors that employed me. Ours was a moonshot team working on the very early prototype (though “prototype” might be generous) of what was to be GM’s first self-driving car, and we called ourselves GMX, a code name so cringeworthy I’m embarrassed to repeat it here. Autonomous driving—it was the holy grail of engineering, the grandest worldwide technological competition since the space race. Every advanced economy in the world had a national champion in the arena—Google, Tesla, Baidu, BMW, Toyota, and us. General Fucking Motors. The Sick Man of Detroit.
Here are some numbers. In 2014 Google invested two billion dollars into a driverless car research center staffed by two hundred of the world’s brightest engineers. Baidu was backed by government money and had access to a pipeline of talent from the best universities in China. BMW had opened new research centers in Munich and Berlin, each with hundreds of employees.
Meanwhile, at General Motors, twenty of us sat in a second-tier corporate center in SoMa. Our shitty “SF office” was sublet from a much sexier, equity-rich(er) start-up, and we only had half of one floor; there was no escaping the penny-pinching Rust Belt ethic in our company DNA. There were no zero-gravity nap pods, shuffleboard tables, afternoon yoga classes, in-office massages, catered lunches, or any of the other amenities my generation of yuppies has come to expect from their high-tech employers. We still worked in cubicles. The odds were immensely against us, but in my mind (at least when I started) that was exactly the reason why we would eventually prevail and the foundation of my once-indefatigable hope. Like the Shire versus Mordor.
Only even Frodo had a Samwise to appreciate him, administer emotional support, and even help out with a few low-level tasks. At GM, I had no one. Obviously with the level of HR competition in the Bay Area, GMX had a difficult time attracting anything close to top-tier talent. The other engineers on my team were complacent, bumbling amateurs who’d struggle to assemble a LEGO Mindstorms set without supervision. They were a truly homogeneous, vanilla tribe—all married with families, each at least five years out of the Zone of Optimal Creativity and Disruptive Potential. I had always wondered how such ordinary people found their way out to the technology center of the world, until one day I heard that they had actually all been stationed out here, more or less voluntold for the new division, by Detroit. I imagined them somberly packing up their neat, midwestern lives in caravans and riding the Oregon Trail out to the Wild West.
Lucas: thirty-three years old, UC Irvine undergrad, Kellogg Business School. A four-year stint selling snake oil at one of those boutique consulting firms before latching onto the underbelly of the bloated whale that is General Motors upper-middle management like a lamprey eel. Lucas was one of those guys who looked like they learned how to dress from an article called “How to Make a Good First Impression” on eHow.com—the same cheap gray suit every day, a needy, brightly-colored tie, sometimes even a pocket square. His current role leading GMX in the remote satellite of San Francisco was to be his proving ground before being inducted into the corporate pantheon of the imperial capital in Detroit, like when the Chinese Communist Party sent Xi Jinping to govern the rural backwater of Fujian Province. To see if he could make something out of nothing.
As I paced in front of Lucas’s office, I couldn’t help but notice that my hands were shaking. The final push of preparation for this meeting had cost me three straight nights of sleep. My shirt was badly wrinkled and my hair was in even worse shape.
Still, I was more excited than nervous. I had delivered—via email, at four thirty that morning—what I had been working toward single-mindedly for the past year: a module that solved (more or less) one of the most difficult technical problems relating to how self-driving cars “see.” The module, my magnum opus, existed in the form of roughly 100,000 lines of heavily commented code, in a secure folder on the General Motors cloud. But because I knew that Lucas was, as they called it, a “nontechnical,” I had also included in the body of the email a three-thousand-word manifesto outlining my vision for the implementation of the program and the possibilities (technological, commercial, civic) that it opened up. No doubt Lucas was carefully studying the contents at that very moment. I thought it was pretty clear that my breakthrough would win him glory from the higher-ups and guarantee my own position.
I knocked on the door. “You may enter,” he said.
When I let myself in I found Lucas leaning back in his chair, hands folded across his lap, staring intently at a brand-new Newton’s cradle that he had acquired for his desk like some caricature of a corporate philosopher-king. He pretended not to see me, so we both watched the balls at the end of the cradle knock each other back and forth for an agonizing five seconds.
“Michael,” he said. “Thanks for coming in. Let’s get started.” He pulled a manila folder with my name on it from his drawer and reviewed the contents privately for about thirty seconds. Then, with a sigh, he put the folder back in the drawer, which made me tense up a little.
“The team appreciates your contributions this year and we’re excited to see what you come up with next,” Lucas said. “You are a reliable engineer who gets the job done. And like I’ve often said, Lord knows you work hard.”
I nodded, eagerly awaiting the next words.
“Alan mentioned before he left that he thought the stuff you were working on was going well. So, that’s good. Now, onto development areas.” Lucas took his steel-colored Oakley glasses off and leaned back in his chair. “Michael, do you know what the secret to GM’s success is?”
“Technology,” I said.
“No,” Lucas said, lifting his index finger. “No, Michael. Not technology. Culture. Values, a way of being with each other. That’s what sustains our success.”
I stared blankly while he kept his finger hanging for a dramatic pause. “You know, Michael, when I hired you out of college—Princeton, right?—four years ago, I knew you were something special. Smart as hell. I mean, you’re the only engineer in this office without a graduate degree. But at some point, Michael, you’ve got to realize that around here it’s not really about this computer stuff at all. To be a leader at this company, you have to live and breathe the culture.” Lucas got up from his seat, walked over to the whiteboard, and wrote CULTURE + TALENT = SUCCESS.
“This is something they taught me at Kellogg,” he said, pausing a little to let the hallowed name sink in, “and I wanted to share it with you. Now, what does culture mean? Let’s break this down.” He picked the marker back up and wrote CULTURE = LEADERSHIP + TEAMWORK + RELATIONSHIPS.
“Culture equals leadership plus teamwork plus relationships, Michael. Brainstorm with me for a minute on how you can improve in those areas.”
At this point he sort of paused, but I couldn’t tell whether it was one of those rhetorical pauses or if he actually expected me to say something. I didn’t know what to say. All of this babble about culture and leadership I thought was just HR boilerplate from the first week. It wasn’t real, like my code. So I said nothing.
“Okay. One aspect of your performance we think you can improve on is leadership,” Michael said. “For example, during our Monday morning check-ins, your voice is often missing from the discussion. I’ll bet you have some great ideas, so why not speak up more?”
“I think it could just be a matter of working style,” I said. “I see myself as having more independent work habits, which means—”
“Ah, but that’s just the thing, Michael,” Lucas cut in. “Actually, this gets me to my next point.” He tapped the word TEAMWORK with his marker. “We really need you to be more of a team player. We hardly see you during the day, but then we find out you’ve been here all night. I spoke with the other guys around here, and some of them don’t even know what you’re working on,” he said.
“Oh, I put it all in my memo to you this morning,” I said, “I’ve been developing a cloud protocol that combines input from existing vehicle-mounted cameras to create a highly accurate 3D map that outperforms LIDAR, all using 5G technology that should be readily available within—”
“Michael. Let’s not dwell on the computer stuff here, focus on the big picture with me for one second. Where do you see yourself in five years?”
I stared at the Newton’s cradle, which was now inert. “As a leader at GMX,” I lied.
“Ah,” Lucas said. “But you’ve got to realize, GM isn’t just a company, it’s a family. And what do families do?”
“Spend time together,” I regurgitated. Lucas nodded and tapped the word RELATIONSHIPS.
“That’s right. Let me tell you something, Michael, take it from someone just a few years older than yourself, succeeding here at this company is all about relationships. The little things matter. Friday happy hour. Playing in the fantasy football league. That’s where you nourish the relationships that are the foundation of your success.”
I imagined myself at the office happy hour interjecting with a comment that implied I didn’t fully grasp the mechanics of a fantasy football bracket. Before I could bring up the module again, Lucas sat back down and looked at me with his hands folded on the table.
“Alright then, it looks like I’ve given you a lot to think about. That’s about it, I believe. Do you have any questions for me at this point?”
I had to ask. I couldn’t just walk out of there without having asked, I could never forgive myself for that.
“Yes, sir,” I began. “I know that since Alan left at the end of last week, the Head of Research position is open.”
I waited. Lucas raised an eyebrow. “Yes, and?”
“I just wanted to put my name in the hat for that,” I stammered. “I’m not sure if you’ve had the chance to review the memo I sent you this morning, but what it contains is significant to the eventual resolution of what we identified as a big problem…”
Lucas interrupted me with a groan. “Michael, I like you, but you’ve got to get more serious with me. You’ve only been out of college for four years and now you want to be Head of Research? You don’t even have a graduate degree! This is General Motors, not seed-round Facebook. We have a way of doing things here. Besides, the position has already been filled—Sanjay will be taking over Monday morning.”
I opened my mouth to make an objection, but the words didn’t come to me.
“You know what,” Lucas added, a little more softly. “You should feel free to take the rest of the day off. Get some rest.”