One year after leaving Google — the honest update

A year ago last month I handed in my notice at Google. I'd been there six years — long enough that the company had become less a place I worked and more a context I inhabited. The badge got you into things. The name opened conversations. The internal culture was its own ecosystem with its own language, its own status systems, its own version of what a good career looked like. Leaving it was stranger than I expected, and the strangeness lasted longer than I was prepared for.

I've had a lot of conversations in the past year with people who are considering the same move. Most of them are asking the same question: what's it actually like? Not the LinkedIn version — the real one. This is my attempt at that.

Why I left — the honest version

I want to get this right because the reason matters for understanding whether the things that followed were about leaving specifically or about leaving Google specifically.

The work had been fine for a long time, then not fine, then actively corrosive. The transition happened gradually. I'd started as an engineer on a product team that moved fast and had clear outcomes. Six years later I was a senior engineer on an infrastructure team that moved slowly, measured success in metrics that felt disconnected from anything a user would ever notice, and spent a significant fraction of my working hours in processes that existed to manage complexity rather than create anything. The money was exceptional. The day-to-day was, without quite intending to be, joyless.

I'd also — and I want to be honest about this because I think it's more common than people admit — grown dependent on the scaffolding in ways that had made me less capable, not more. Google has systems for everything. There are tools to do things that everywhere else you write yourself. There are people whose whole job is to handle things that at a smaller company you'd handle yourself. After six years I had stopped knowing what I was capable of without the scaffold, and that uncertainty had become its own source of low-grade anxiety.

I left without a job to go to. I had eight months of expenses saved — enough, I calculated, to find something without panic. I left on a Friday, took the weekend, and on Monday morning sat at my desk with nothing scheduled and thought: right. What now.

Month one: the dislocation

The first thing that happened was a version of identity vertigo that I hadn't fully anticipated. I'd known intellectually that "Google engineer" had become part of how I described myself. I hadn't understood how central it was until it was gone. The first time someone at a social event asked what I did and I said "I'm between things at the moment" — a sentence that was completely accurate and completely inadequate — I felt something deflate that I hadn't known was being held up.

I also, unexpectedly, missed the structure. I'd resented the meetings and the processes and the quarterly planning cycles for years. Without them, I had no idea how to structure a day. The first two weeks I wrote elaborate to-do lists and then ignored them. I went for walks at odd times. I cooked elaborate meals. I was, by most objective measures, fine, and I was also adrift in a way that the official narrative of "I left a tech job to figure out what I actually want" doesn't quite capture.

The Google alumni network helps with this more than I expected. There's a specific social world of former employees, particularly in Seattle where I'm based, that softens the disorientation — people who understand precisely what the transition feels like because they've made it themselves. If you're considering this move and haven't already connected with the alumni community in your area, it's worth doing before you leave, not after.

Months two through four: the recalibration

I'd given myself permission to take three months before actively looking for work. This turned out to be the right call, though not for the reasons I expected.

The primary value of those months wasn't rest — I hadn't been acutely burned out when I left, just progressively depleted and unclear. The primary value was recalibration. Without the ambient context of big tech — without the constant implicit comparisons to what your peers were working on, what the compensation benchmarks suggested your labour was worth, what the next level required — I started to get a much clearer picture of what I actually valued in work.

What that looked like in practice: I took on a small consulting project in month two through a former colleague, not primarily for the money (it paid $800 a day, which felt like a lot and was probably below market) but because I wanted to understand how I functioned outside the scaffold. The answer was: differently than I expected, and better in some ways. I made decisions faster. I owned outcomes completely. I talked to users directly rather than through layers of research and product. The work was rougher and less well-supported than anything I'd done at Google and it was also, in a way I hadn't felt in years, mine.

I also spent time — more honestly than I'd been able to while employed — working out what the last six years had actually cost. Not financially, which was obviously positive, but in terms of what I'd stopped developing, what I'd stopped attempting, what parts of my professional capability had atrophied because the environment didn't require them. The list was longer than I wanted it to be.

The financial reality: one year out

At the point of leaving, my total compensation at Google was approximately $245,000 — base salary of $178,000, annual bonus of $32,000, and RSU vesting of around $35,000 at the share price at the time. I knew I was leaving this. I had modelled what the gap would look like. I still found the experience of the first invoice — $4,800 for three days of consulting work — genuinely disorienting.

The year one numbers, honestly: I spent four months not working, by choice. I did approximately 40 days of consulting at rates between $800 and $1,200 per day as I found my pricing. I joined a Series B health-tech company in month eight on a permanent contract at $160,000 base — an $18,000 reduction from my Google base, with no equivalent RSU package, and better actual working conditions than I'd experienced in three years.

Total compensation year one was approximately $105,000 against a Google baseline of $245,000. I drew down roughly $60,000 of savings. This was within my model. It was also, experientially, harder than the model suggested it would be — not catastrophically, but in the ways that money-related things become hard when the gap between income and identity is wider than you're used to.

What's actually different — and what isn't

A year out, some things have changed substantially. Some haven't, and I want to be honest about both.

What's different: I have a much clearer sense of what I'm capable of without institutional support. The consulting period was valuable specifically because it removed the scaffold and the competence held up — and in some ways expanded. I make better decisions about my own time than I did at Google, where the ambient sense that everything was important had made prioritisation nearly impossible. My relationship with work is less entangled with my sense of self-worth, not because I did the work to separate them deliberately, but because the separation was forced and I survived it.

I also have a more accurate picture of what big tech compensation buys. Some of it is straightforward comfort and security. Some of it — and I think this is the part people undervalue before they leave — is psychological compression. The combination of exceptional pay, prestigious employer, and high-performing peers creates a social context that resolves a lot of questions about worth and status before they can become anxious. When that context is gone, those questions come back. Working through them is valuable. It's also more work than the compensation suggests it will be.

What isn't different: I still work too much. The tendency to over-invest in the work, to conflate being busy with being productive, to find it difficult to stop — these didn't leave with the Google badge. They came with me. I'd expected the change of environment to change the habit. It didn't, meaningfully. That required more deliberate work on a different dimension.

Would I do it again

Yes. Without significant hesitation. But with a different set of expectations than I had going in.

I'd expected the year to feel like liberation. It felt more like a long process of working out who I actually was without the structural support of a highly-defined role at a prestigious employer. That process produced real clarity, but it wasn't the clean break the resignation email had suggested it might be. It was gradual, non-linear, and had months that were genuinely hard in ways that the decision to leave didn't feel like it warranted.

What I'd tell someone standing where I was standing twelve months ago: the financial modelling matters and most people do it reasonably well. The identity modelling is almost always inadequate, because you cannot fully understand what the employer context is doing for your sense of self until you remove it. Give that more time and more honest attention than the spreadsheet gets. The spreadsheet is the easier problem.

If you're thinking through the financial side of a similar move, the runway calculation article has the specific framework I'd recommend — including the parts that most financial planning advice misses, and the psychological element of spending savings that nobody puts in a calculator.