In some ✨personal news✨, I’ve recently left Google. It was a great ~3 year ride, and I couldn’t have asked for a better place to begin my career.
Obligatory badge-and-laptop goodbye photo
Whenever I’d interview candidates for Google, a frequent question was “What’s the best part of working there?”. Invariably, I’d answer with the well-worn (but true!) cliche that it’s the people who work here which make it special – not the free food. 😉 I was lucky to work with a bunch of talented engineers, several of whom became valuable mentors. (You know who you are; thanks again!)
I also got to write and review a small mountain of Go code at the company at which that language was created. This was a fun experience that helped me level-up as a programmer.
So, why leave? It was much more of a “pull” than a “push”. Things were going well! I enjoyed the work I was doing, my impact was increasing over time, and I was progressively increasing my scope. My team recently shipped something that was a ~year in the making, and the usage metrics were encouraging.
But out of the corner of my eye, I saw myself approaching a comfortable local maximum. The pace of my learning was decreasing, and I saw a plateau in the not-too-distant future. From experience, I know myself well enough that once I hit a local maximum I find it challenging to break out.
So, when an opportunity arose to “reset” to a new stack with a new org and problem space, it felt like an appropriate time to make the switch.
What’s next? I’m joining Databricks, working to help build out their platform infrastructure. I’ve been interested in Databricks' problem domain since college, and am really looking forward to experiencing what it’s like to work in a smaller, rapidly scaling engineering org.
(Oh, and yes, this was the context behind Tools for Making Difficult Decisions)