I'm leaving Google with a bitter smile 💔

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6839578952244310016/

@codewiz interesting first hand information about the evolution of a company. Unluckily my company has the same attitude as your previous employer, but never moved away from the hierarchical company structure ever.

@5tr34k_ From day 1, Google's founders trashed the standard book of management to try something radically new: what if we hired engineers with a startup founder mindset and retained them by giving them the autonomy and dignity they expect and deserve?

@patrick I would have loved to work on Chrome OS! In fact, that's the project I had chosen when I was hired in Cambridge. I saw it as our only hope to finally celebrate "the year of Linux on the desktop".

Then, the week before my start date, the CAM site director called to share the news: my team was being defragged and they wanted to see if I'd be interested in joining Search Infra instead 😭

I actually don't regret working on Search: it was an amazing codebase ran in production by some of the top SREs in the company. The lead of the GWS SREs was Red Hat's employee number one, who ported sysVinit to Linux.

And among my neighbors in Cambridge was Robert Love, author of one of the first books on Linux kernel development.

All my coworkers were superstars, and for the first time in my career, I didn't feel qualified for the job.

@patrick #google

@patrick By the way, which Chromebook should I get these days?

For personal use, I want a fast mobile cpu and plenty of ram and ssd for Crostini.