Episode 1: Leap.
Throughout my life, my growth is a series of increments and leaps. My most recent leap was joining Google and since then it was only increments: I have been on the same team for 7+ years. I learned to work in a team setting and across teams, express myself in English clearly and convince others, scope and prioritize work, build distributed systems, focus on the user, etc. I grew from SWE III (L4) to Staff SWE (L6).
However staying in the same place has diminishing returns, and at some point the growth slowed down enough that another leap is more efficient. It became clear that it is time to change teams.
At the same time I and my wife finally decided to leave Bay Area and chose Seattle area as the destination. Here, the choice of teams at Google is not as great as in Bay Area. There is Google Cloud team in Seattle, but it felt different from the rest of Google (rumors, exec from Oracle) and it is #3 Cloud provider — I was cautious. There is also Fuchsia OS, which seems attractive, but my life is too short for C++ 😝.
There was one team at Google that I dreamed of joining for years: the Go language team. However, each time I inquired there was something off: too close to promo in my current team, then no headcount in the Go team, then internal tooling support as opposed to the open source part, then they hired only in NYC. I emailed their director again: remote work was OK now, but there were no jobs for my level (L6) — I waited for too long and got overqualified for my dream job 🤣.
Throughout my life, my growth is a series of increments and leaps. My most recent leap was joining Google and since then it was only increments: I have been on the same team for 7+ years. I learned to work in a team setting and across teams, express myself in English clearly and convince others, scope and prioritize work, build distributed systems, focus on the user, etc. I grew from SWE III (L4) to Staff SWE (L6).
However staying in the same place has diminishing returns, and at some point the growth slowed down enough that another leap is more efficient. It became clear that it is time to change teams.
At the same time I and my wife finally decided to leave Bay Area and chose Seattle area as the destination. Here, the choice of teams at Google is not as great as in Bay Area. There is Google Cloud team in Seattle, but it felt different from the rest of Google (rumors, exec from Oracle) and it is #3 Cloud provider — I was cautious. There is also Fuchsia OS, which seems attractive, but my life is too short for C++ 😝.
There was one team at Google that I dreamed of joining for years: the Go language team. However, each time I inquired there was something off: too close to promo in my current team, then no headcount in the Go team, then internal tooling support as opposed to the open source part, then they hired only in NYC. I emailed their director again: remote work was OK now, but there were no jobs for my level (L6) — I waited for too long and got overqualified for my dream job 🤣.