WHYYYY???
Seventh in a series of "An update on David" retrospectives, looking back on the last 11 years at Google: "WHYYYY???". [Cue memes] Last night was the NYC TI holiday party and I met nearly all the significant others of people on my team. Often my teammate would mention "Tomorrow is David's last day" and a few SOs replied with "Wow, why are you leaving Google???" Why indeed. For many years I always thought that people were crazy to leave Google. Even my wife, when I would tell her so-and-so was leaving, would ask "why???" So here's the big reveal: I never felt like I fit in here. This isn't impostor syndrome, as in, "they'll know I'm a fraud ". It's more like "WTF am I doing here? All my teammates/coworkers/other Googlers are smarter than me, learn faster, think deeper, anticipate problems and plan with more strategy than I do." Sometimes it's debilitating, and I've gone