[amscanne]

People aren't blacklisted for leaving, that's blatantly false. Your story is obviously missing some key elements.

Median tenure does not necessarily indicate retention issues for core roles at any company. It could simply be rapid growth or lots of roles that typically come with high turnover (e.g Amazon's warehouse employees).

[nostrademons]

You get classified as "regretted" or "non-regretted" attrition. If you're "regretted", you can come back anytime within I think 2 years without interviewing, or with favorable interview afterwards. If you're "non-regretted", it can become very difficult to come back unless you have a really strong recommendation from some other manager within Google, or come in through a company they acquire. They already have data on your job performance that's a lot more reliable than an interview, and if it's negative, it'll take a lot to overcome that.

[varelse]

That sounds right. I was on a team leaking personnel managed by a manager who clearly wanted to be doing other things with his other team and who forgot I existed for the 3 out of the 4 months I was there until I reminded him I existed whereupon I was told I was failing to meet his expectations.

Upon complaining that it was unfair to judge me behind the curve when there had been zero feedback whatsoever up to that point, he then reported me to HR and offered to let me leave the team. There were two other potential teams making use of the technology for which I have expertise: one was new and it had zero openings at the time but which is now arguably one of the most prominent teams at Google and the other one's manager asked me one question "Where did you get your degree?" and didn't like my answer (I suspect) because it wasn't Stanford (desirable attributes for the position listed a Stanford degree) but I don't know for sure because he cut off communication at that point

And yes, in a perfect world I should have reminded my manager sooner of my existence but he was off on paternity leave as well with no one to run things in his absence so I really don't know the winning move here other than what I did: leave for one of Google's competitors where I spent the next 4.5 years or so focusing exclusively on the aforementioned technology.

If Google HR is dismissing the AUC of my entire career over 4 blind-allocated months at Google, that's asinine, but it would explain a lot and fit the facts. Thanks for the info.

[stuckagain]

Indeed, "blacklisted for leaving Google" seems pretty far-fetched. In reality people who leave Google with reasonable performance ratings have the option to return within 6 months after they leave.