I always thought that companies fell into one of two categories: evil or insignificant. Most companies have very little impact in any meaningful way. These companies might do fun work, but in the grand scheme of things they are fairly insignificant. A few companies stand out and make a real difference in the world (for good and for bad), but these companies always have some amount of evil attached to them. Facebook, Google, Twitter (I refuse to use the new name), Microsoft, Amazon – all have a huge impact and have done tremendous good (in some cases), but they have all had negative side effects and can be considered evil in some ways.

Niantic felt like a unicorn to me because they had a modest (but real) impact and were not evil. They obviously had a huge (but short lived) impact in the summer of 2016, but even now a lot of people enjoy playing Pokémon Go. It got people going outside, walking, and exploring (and has even been credited with solving a murder). While playing, I met a lot of people who probably had a hard time interacting with normal people, but were able to through the game. Niantic even handed out a book of compiled letters it had received from various players detailing the positive effect that the game has had in their lives.

And the company wasn’t evil – they never sold data (at least not while I was there). The vast majority of their money was made through in-game purchases, but most players had no problem playing for free.

In my entire career, I’d say that Niantic was my favorite job. I loved my co-workers, the job was fun, I could make an impact, and I was well rewarded. At one point in late 2020 and early 2021, it even looked like my stock options could be worth up to 3 million dollars if the company went public at that time (As I write this, Niantic was recently sold to a Saudi Arabian company and while it’s possible that I could see a little money from that sale, it’s likely that I won’t see much).

If I loved my job so much, then why did I leave? Piaw was more connected to management than I was, so he started seeing problems arise before I did. We hired a new director of engineering in 2021 and then later hired an outside manager to add a layer between my boss and the director of engineering.

The new manager was a case study on how NOT to manage. They immediately mandated that we entirely re-architect the game servers without any discussion (because they were used to stateless servers and ours were stateful). They even made a very good engineer cry. I’m very open to being told that there are better ways of handling problems, but:

• Pokémon Go solves an N squared problem on a global scale, so it has some fairly unique server requirements. As the game is location based, it needs to communicate with the server very frequently.
• At this point, Pokémon Go had been running for 5 years (and Ingress had been running much longer), was very successful financially, and had millions of users. Normally you don’t make sweeping architectural changes without first identifying specific problems, goals, and planning.
• The Niantic employees were very smart, and all design decisions were carefully made for specific reasons. Mandating changes without first understanding these reasons is not good engineering or managerial practice.

This was like a punch in the face to me – I had never seen such toxicity in my entire career. I had never spoke personally with our new director of engineering, so I set up some time with him to discuss it. He was very nice, but it only took about 5 minutes to see where the toxicity was coming from. I learned that my happy job had become entirely toxic without me even realizing it.

Piaw left Niantic in October 2021. A few days later I saw that he had recently viewed my LinkedIn profile, so I messaged him to see what was up. He responded saying that I can call him if I wanted to. When I called, his first sentence was – “Let’s be clear – You called me, I didn’t call you and I didn’t ask you to call me, right?” So it was one of THOSE phone calls.

I learned that several people saw the toxicity coming long before I did and those people started looking for new jobs several months previous, eventually deciding to shop around as a group package. Piaw’s college roommate (who he also worked with at Google) was at a small company in San Francisco named Nuna, and that’s where they all decided to go. In the 24 hours between the time that he left Niantic and started at Nuna, Piaw had received an offer that he couldn’t refuse from a company called Aurora (which is making self-driving trucks), but the others were still planning on going to Nuna. He told me that if I wanted to leave Niantic, he could introduce me to people at both Nuna and Aurora (as well as a few other companies).

By the end of that phone call, I had decided that it was time for me to leave Niantic. I figured that I’d start looking around and hopefully change jobs around the start of the new year.

By March 2022, all but one of the senior staff engineers had left Niantic.