Hasnain says:

Interesting post mortem from a long tenure at a big tech company.

Brad is no lightweight; he’s written a bunch of critical software that powers the internet - even before joining Google.

The reasons for leaving were also interesting:

“Little bored. Not learning as much as I used to. I've been doing the same thing too long and need a change. It'd be nice to primarily work in Go rather than work on Go.

When I first joined Google it was a chaotic first couple years while I learned Google's internal codebase, build system, a bunch of new languages, Borg, Bigtable, etc. Then I joined Android it was fun/learning chaos again. Go was the same when I joined and it was a new, fast-moving experiment. Now Go is very popular, stable and, while there's a lot to do, things--often necessarily--move pretty slowly. Moving slowly is fine, and hyper-specializing in small corners of Go makes sense at scale (few percent improvements add up!), but I want to build something new again.

I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans.)”

Posted on 2020-01-27T20:15:14+0000