> I started losing a lot of sleep, and I got a lot of headaches and back pain. I got a lot of "brain fog": inability to concentrate or make decisions. I s

> I started losing a lot of sleep, and I got a lot of headaches and back pain. I got a lot of "brain fog": inability to concentrate or make decisions. I started forgetting words and names and losing the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. I felt like I had no energy left for anything other than work, and I could barely manage that. Other than back pain these symptoms match mine exactly, except I hadn't worked full time for the past 2 years and I wouldn't say I'm stressed or anything. I'm not sure what it is - maybe cabin fever? Yesterday I nearly lost consciousness when I got up too quickly. I'm also losing weight (12kg so far, which would be great if I knew _why_ I'm losing weight). Did a blood test about a month ago - everything is fine. I did wonder if these are vaccine side effects, but that seems very implausible - the second dose was in May. But I digress. I totally get what Jay is saying in his writeup. I largely felt the same way except in the opposite direction in one aspect - the number and shrillness of "activists" has become overbearing to the point where it was severely impeding work and morale. Seeing that he has pronouns in his twitter bio he might have been more sympathetic, but I bet this stuff distracted even him. Contrary to belief popular on the outside, Google is indeed a fairly stressful and thankless place unless you're skilled at self promotion, which I'm not, or you don't care about working on cool things and getting promoted. This is why every time their recruiters ping me I tell them I'm not interested "at this time". No matter how much they pay me, I can't imagine subjecting myself to such treatment again. And I was pretty successful there - high profile projects, wrote lots of code, shipped impressive stuff, and I still felt like shit most of the time. I can only imagine what less "forceful" folks feel if I felt like a gnat on this elephant's ass. Contrary to belief popular inside Google, life is great on the outside. Freedom is a thing folks, and without moving around you aren't experiencing it. I know when you're on the inside it feels like you're "changing the world", but of all Google products nowadays I only use Gmail and YouTube. If everything else disappeared completely I wouldn't even notice. Heck, if Gmail disappeared I'd switch to Proton Mail in a day, and if YouTube disappeared there's BitChute and Rumble which are modest, but adequate. So whatever you're "changing" there impacts me very little, and mostly in negative ways. I certainly do not regret leaving. If anything I should have left much sooner than I did.