FAQ on Leaving Google

I had to pause here for a second

> “enormous pride” in “building” a Chicago Engineering office over decades, and achieving really cool things in the Developer, “Ads”, and Search divisions

Why? He and Brian Fitzpatrick were the founding engineers for the Chicago office. I worked with them on Google Code back when there was almost no competition in forges and GitHub had just barely become a thing. Search brings enormous value to all kinds of people and Ads makes it all financially viable. There is plenty to be proud of and without those founding engineers in that office Chicago would not have been a part of it and offered gainful employment to many different engineers in that area. He was a fantastic manager and a great director.

My favorite were his (or fitz's) videos of the building they moved into; it was an old storage facility and they had to defrost something like 30 years of ice and remove 50 years of walls.

He basically built svnhub before github existed, but leadership saw little to no value in owning a code site. He knew how to build products for professional hackers who wanted to build interesting things. And he helped fund a generation of gsoc hackers improving open source codes.