I'd been founding a startup at the time and decided that if I wanted any income for the next couple years I should probably look for a job. Ended up getting hi

I'd been founding a startup at the time and decided that if I wanted any income for the next couple years I should probably look for a job. Ended up getting hired by Google despite the press reporting they were in a hiring freeze. It was...a good decision, but I sometimes wonder if it could've been better. Financially I did really well, because my stock options were granted at the bottom of the market in 2009, and I got to work on a bunch of really cool stuff with really smart teammates, and I'm also glad to have worked at Google in the 09-11 period when they still had a fair bit of the old culture in them. Plus in 09 everybody was just glad to have a job, any job, and it felt like the rat race fell away for a couple years. My rent didn't budge for the first 3 years I was in California. I've heard that there may be a reputation bump from getting hired at Google in 2009 (since they hired so few people), but I haven't looked for a job since then, so I dunno how true that is. OTOH, I look at people who did keep going with their startups, and actually accelerated into the discomfort, and sometimes I wonder if I made the wrong choice. The class of startups & computing projects released during the 08/09 recession includes DropBox, AirBnB, Thumbtack, WhatsApp, Bitcoin, Node.js, Angular, and several you haven't heard of (sometimes they were started beforehand, but this is when they started getting adoption). And my plan-B if I didn't get into Google was to go all-in on Android development. People who actually did that in 2009 did pretty well, because it was a time when the huge markets hadn't yet been picked clean and the hardware was getting better every year.