> Googlers wanted to ship great work, but often couldn’t. While there were undoubtedly people who came in for the food, worked 3 hours a day, and enjoyed their early retirements, all the people I met were earnest, hard-working, and wanted to do great work.

> What beat them down were the gauntlet of reviews, the frequent re-orgs, the institutional scar tissue from past failures, and the complexity of doing even simple things on the world stage. Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can.

I started as someone excited to learn, make things happen, and work hard. Within a few months I realized that the team I joined was the "wrong" version and the "right" version of that team was in another department I couldn't transfer to. My manager was in denial, my team-mates were quitting rapidly, and my skip manager was incredibly toxic.

But the worst part was that doing even a simple thing was a monumental task. Something that for a startup could take an hour to pick up, turn into a PR, get review, launch and get analytics on would take 2 months at Google. You could do other stuff in parallel of course but the iteration cycles were horribly slow and the ability to get feedback almost non-existent. The team I joined had worked on their product for 6 years and only just got the most primitive feedback metrics a few months into my joining.

3 months in and I knew I had to quit. I was out of there 15 months after joining. I'm going back to the startup world on Monday and I'm actually really excited!

The extra pay of Google doesn't matter to me. The extra scale of Google doesn't matter to me. I never want to work at a big organization again and would rather die poor and accomplished than rich and depressed. I came to Silicon Valley to learn as much as possible. If I work on a high-scale system I need to have earned that by building, launching, and supporting that system from step 0. If I get big pay I need to have earned that from excellent product development.