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Comment by onemoresoop | Hacker News Reader

> Fast forward a few years and I’d moved to New York, cycled through Creative Lab and landed at YouTube. As I neared the ten-year mark, my first boss, Sally Cole, who’d left Google many years before, joked that I was surely due for an existential crisis. But when I got back to work after having my son Malcolm in 2017, it wasn’t me who was having an existential crisis. It was Google itself.

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A Star Trek TNG tag line comes to mind: "If there is nothing wrong with me, then there must be something wrong with the Universe".

"The short explanation for my decision is my health: I’m having another baby in the fall (I acknowledge that there’s incredible privilege in being able to walk away from a job like this)."

You make it sound like having a child is the main reason (which would, admittedly, be pretty normal anywhere other than at a progressive tech company - motherhood is hard), whereas the article suggests that the main reason is internal retaliation and gaslighting, and the baby is just the straw that broke the camel's back.

The commenter I replied to left out this important detail that is also somewhat buried 3/4 of the way into the letter. Definitely read her original statement and form your own opinion based on the source material.

Cherry-picking the first sentence is a bit dishonest:

"I made the choice after the heads of my department branded me with a kind of scarlet letter that makes it difficult to do my job or find another one. If I stayed, I didn’t just worry that there’d be more public flogging, shunning, and stress, I expected it."

... are the next two sentences, and sounds like this weighed on her just as heavily as a pending childbirth.

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