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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

I started writing this retrospective during my last week at Google, I have already wrapped up everything, had my goodbyes. In the spirit of SRE (as an ex-SRE), I thought it would be fun to write a little retrospective in the form of a postmortem. Introduction I joined Google young and relatively inexperienced and had spent about 9 years there. I started my journey in software at 19 (first internship) and then continued working part and full time while continuing my degree in Applied Physics.

reached/exceeded my financial goals fascination with Google tech waned: industry somewhat caught up reality of actual work not being that mind blowing my interests saturated/shifted desire to start my own company (yes, I can wait, but not for decades!) company became less fun/cool budget cuts (less business travel, no mind blowing offsites anymore) layoffs Head Count shifting to cheap locations aggressively - less opportunity for me to grow my organization locally lots of overheads related to security/regulations many hard engineering challenges due to complex systems and relationships between teams slowing the velocity cognitive load - this was less of a factor in my last role, but bigger problem in the previous one. I was promised further expansion twice, which later was scratched and then promised again in a bit different form… senior level managers overwhelmed and not providing support/feedback or pretty much any oversight (there were moments when things felt a bit like a wild west) there were many periods when I felt like I was overwhelmed with meetings/repetitive work/underresourced team, but at the same time not having good engineering/or management growth opportunities cognitive load at Google is very high - there is a countless number of systems and technologies that it’s useful to have in mind and can affect your system in one way or another (this is especially bad in SRE)

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