Today is my last day as a Google employee. It is a Monday, I am at my own desk, and there is nothing on the calendar. The actual leaving happened a while ago.

I wrote the note to my colleagues in about twenty minutes, which surprised me. I had been drafting it in my head for weeks, and when I finally sat down to type it, the thing that came out was much shorter than any of the versions I had rehearsed. It said that after twenty one years, July 10 would be my last day in the office. That part is already three weeks old. Google was kind enough to let me take the vacation I had accrued, which is how a departure in July becomes a final paycheck in August, and how I ended up with a month to think about what those twenty one years actually were.

Twenty one years is almost half my life. I have been doing the arithmetic on that for a while now and it still does not quite land. I turned 30 at Google. I turned 40 at Google. This year I turn 50, and for the first time since I was in my twenties, I will do it somewhere else.

What twenty one years actually looks like

The résumé version of this is easy to write and not very interesting. I joined in March 2005 as a Software Engineer in Test, working on the Mountain View municipal Wi-Fi network. I moved to London and spent four years building test engineering across Europe. I came back to Mountain View in 2009 and worked on Google’s internal HR systems for a couple of years. In 2011 I moved to Google Maps as a tech lead on Street View, with a team of three people, and I stayed in Maps until 2019, by which point the job involved camera hardware, photogrammetry pipelines, and machine learning over most of the roads on Earth. I spent two years as Chief of Staff for Core. I helped start Core ML in 2021 and spent three years on compilers and TPUs. Then I ran the AI Developer organization, which is where Kaggle and Colab and AI Studio and the Gemini API live. Last August I went back to being an individual contributor as a Distinguished Engineer at DeepMind, building agents and developer tools.

That list is accurate and it tells you almost nothing. What it leaves out is that every one of those transitions was the same decision made over and over: go find the thing you do not understand yet. My favorite part of the job, in every one of those roles, was being exposed to technologies and ideas I had not come across before. I never once moved because a job was going badly. I moved because I had stopped being confused, and being confused turned out to be the part I liked.

The other thing the list leaves out is the people. Google has felt like a family for most of those twenty one years, through the good stretches and the genuinely hard ones. I learned how to think about organizations from Luiz André Barroso, who I still miss. I learned how to hold an opinion loosely from a co-worker who pulled me aside after Larry Page publicly disliked a project of mine and said, “Don’t sweat it. That’s just his opinion.” I was devastated in that room and fine an hour later, and that hour taught me more about engineering culture than any process document ever did.

A month of being neither thing

The gap between those two dates turned out to be the most interesting part of this whole transition, and I did not see that coming.

My access ended on July 10. Badge, systems, everything, all of it gone that afternoon. So for the last three weeks I have been technically employed and functionally an outsider, which is a stranger position than either being there or being gone. It is also the closest thing to a controlled experiment on your own identity that anyone will ever hand you: here is your life without the job, thirty days, and you are still on the payroll while you run it.

I had assumed I would find it uncomfortable, because I have been at least partly defined by that place since I was 28. What actually happened is that after about four days of feeling strange, I stopped noticing. I got up, I worked on my own things, and the days filled themselves without any help. What surprised me most was the shape of what I missed. I stopped thinking about the projects almost immediately, far faster than I would have predicted. I am still thinking about the people every day.

If you are contemplating something similar and your company gives you a runway like this, take all of it. It is not a vacation and it is not idleness. It is a trial run. I could have called my manager any day in the last three weeks and told him I had rethought it, and at no point did I feel the urge. That is a more honest answer than any amount of deliberation would have produced, and I would not have gotten it from the inside.

Why now

There is no dramatic version of this.

What changed is that I spent the last year with my hands back on the keyboard, and I found out what I had traded away during the leadership years. I wrote about that when I counted up 4,255 GitHub contributions and discovered that my most productive days were Saturdays, because Saturdays were the days nobody had scheduled anything. That number was not a productivity brag. It was a diagnosis. Given time and no meetings, I build things, compulsively, and I am happier.

Once you know that about yourself, the question stops being whether to leave and becomes when. Twenty one years is a long time to build inside one set of walls, however good the walls are. I want to find out what I do without them.

What I am not doing

I am not retiring, which is the word I kept reaching for in early drafts and kept deleting. Retirement implies stopping. I have a list of ideas that have been nagging at me for two years and, for the first time in a very long while, the time to actually focus on them.

I am also not going to spend this blog relitigating Google. There is a genre of leaving-the-big-company essay that is really a grievance in a trench coat, and I have no interest in writing one. I have nothing but admiration for the place. It is full of well meaning, smart people doing their best, and I am proud to have counted myself among them for as long as I did. Did we always get it right? No, of course not. But I never saw us stop trying, and that is a rarer thing in a company of that size than people outside it tend to believe.

Thank you

So: thank you to everyone I worked with over those twenty one years. If we overlapped anywhere in that stretch, from the municipal Wi-Fi project in 2005 to the Antigravity SDK, which was the last thing I shipped before I left, I am easy to find, and I would genuinely like to stay in touch.

There is a next chapter, and I am looking forward to telling you about it. That is tomorrow’s post.

The badge went back on July 10, and the laptop went with it, stickers and all. The payroll ends today. My personal laptop is collecting its own stickers now, and the editor is still open.