I did ten years at Microsoft; loved it, but wanted a change, and Google desperately wanted people with VM experience to build GCE. I was at Google for six year

I did ten years at Microsoft; loved it, but wanted a change, and Google desperately wanted people with VM experience to build GCE. I was at Google for six years; I had a lot of fun building various parts of cloud, but then at some point realized I didn’t really care a lot about the component I was working on, and looking around, I didn’t see a lot of other projects going on that I really felt passionately about. I had some savings, and wasn’t really worried about finding •some• other software engineering job in Seattle if that ran low, so I decided to take off to think about what I really wanted to be doing in life. And then a friend reached out to me - he was founding a startup, and was I interested in joining? So I did an ML startup for a couple of years. It was tremendous fun; lots of work, but I felt very connected to what I was building, why I was building it, &c; it felt good to be really thinking about the product from an end-to-end, “How is this going to delight the customer?” point of view. I think I’d have had to be a director at Google to have the same level of involvement with the entirety of what I was building... And then, we were bought by Intel. It’s not too different, though - it’s a much bigger company, of course, but I feel pretty connected to the stuff I’m working on; I see and understand the business case, and my role in it. I don’t know that I’ll work at Intel forever, but certainly for the foreseeable future; I’m having fun, and feel pretty fortunate to be working here.