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Saying Goodbye to the Best Gig I Ever Had
AI Notes
The May 2020 farewell to Grab, posted from a locked-down Seattle house after two years and five months as Head of Engineering for Ads and Monetisation. The proximate cause is named up front: serious COVID risk factors plus a job that requires being on the ground in Jakarta, Singapore, KL, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City multiple times a year. The retrospective in the middle is the reason to read it. Steve writes down what a Westerner has to learn to work inside Grab: trust relationships built over drinks, not meetings; the meeting itself is a rubber-stamp on alignment reached in the meeting before the meeting; skip that step and you get the meeting after the meeting, where the people who nodded politely go off and decide something different. Western defaults — vocal self-criticism, "relentlessly exposing reality," bringing solutions instead of problems — are explicitly named as anti-patterns.
The closing bracket on the Grab chapter that Why I Left Google to Join Grab opened in 2018. The skills recorded here — psychological safety, alignment before confrontation, trust as infrastructure — transfer back to wherever you came from.
Related listings
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2018
Why I Left Google to Join Grab
The opening bracket. The 2018 piece announces the bet on Southeast Asia and the "go to the ground" thesis; this one, two and a half years later, is what he found there. Read them as a pair — the prediction and the field report.
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2012
Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus
Steve's earlier attempt to write down a culture he was embedded in — the conservative vs. liberal split at Google. The Grab farewell does the same anthropological move eight years later in Asia: notice the unwritten rules, give them names, write them down before they become invisible.
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2020
Dear Google Cloud, Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You
Posted three months after this one, also from inside the same Seattle pandemic lockdown. The Grab farewell is the warm version; the Google Cloud rant is the sharp version. Both written by someone who has just finished spending several years inside a non-Western engineering culture and come back to compare notes.