This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gregor Konzett, a 27-year-old former Google employee based in London. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
When I got relocated to work out of Google’s Mountain View headquarters in 2024, it was a dream come true.
I was raised in a small village in Austria, but I always dreamed of living in Silicon Valley. As a child who was excited about tech, I wanted to be where innovation happened.
My team was based in California, but I was working from London. Not even a year into my job, I was asking if I could be transferred.
Two years after getting hired as a software engineer, Google transferred me to Silicon Valley. Then, a year after that, I quit. I packed up my bags and moved back to London in just two weeks to participate in a startup accelerator program. It was worth the risk, even in this difficult job market.
Living in Silicon Valley was incredible
I joined Google in 2022 as a software engineer on the Google Pixel audio team. I enjoyed my job, but being in London, the physical distance turned minor questions into major delays. If I hit a blocker with a specific subsystem, I’d send a message and wait 24 hours for a reply due to time zone differences, or spend many late nights in chats with colleagues to unblock myself.
After I was finally relocated to the Mountain View headquarters, living in the Bay Area was almost exactly as I had always imagined it from movies and TV. California is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to, and being able to call it my home was incredible.
It was great to be part of an environment filled with so many other engineers. I remember going surfing with some people and just having the most Silicon Valley conversation ever about coding and deep tech. The only thing I didn’t expect was that it’s not this crazy, futuristic place. In reality, the infrastructure was just OK, and the internet speed wasn’t even very reliable.
I went from hitting a stride to hitting a plateau in California
The work life at the Google headquarters was really nice. On average, it was a typical 9-to-5, and my team had a really great dynamic.
For the first few months, I was learning a lot, and everything ramped up quickly. My team gave me a lot of responsibility and trusted me to handle huge pieces of the system, which is amazing and rare for a company of its size.
Being in the office, I got to sit on the same floor as the teams building the specific subsystems I was coding for, and sit in meetings where product decisions were actually made. I could walk 10 feet, point at a whiteboard, and solve complex architectural issues in minutes. I learned more in those first three months at Google than I had in the last two years.
However, after about a year, I felt like I had reached a natural ceiling in my work, and I wasn’t learning much anymore. I wasn’t super happy in my job, and my visa limited me from working on my own projects outside of Google, which was my real dream.
I questioned if it was the right time to leave a stable job
One of my closest friends got into a startup accelerator program in London and encouraged me to apply, with the plan of using it as an opportunity to cofound our own startup. When I got accepted with a start date only a month away, I knew I’d have to make a quick decision. I loved California, and leaving Google would mean leaving the country.
The job market has been terrible, and I questioned whether this was the right time to quit my job and potentially face unemployment. However, I felt confident in my technical background and having Google on my résumé, so I believed I could find another job.
The hardest part about deciding to quit was that it was objectively a really good job, and leaving meant giving up my path to a green card in the US. I was stuck in a dilemma: do I stay in a role I’ve outgrown for four, or potentially even more years, just to secure permanent residency, or do I quit to chase higher job satisfaction?
I realized that staying for the sake of immigration meant stalling my career development.
I figured now was the time to take a risk. I’m young and have a financial runway from my Google salary, and I don’t have a mortgage to pay or a family to care for. So, I put in my two weeks at Google.
Eventually, I will return to California to keep building
It’s been a few months since I joined the program, and my friend and I are working on our startup, Vestry.ai, which fixes the observability gap for complex hardware. Our plan is to build while we’re in the accelerator, get funding, and move back to California to live the startup life.
California is ultimately the place to be for anything in the startup world. We want to be a part of the AI revolution, and that’s just where you’ve got to be.
I’ve been so busy with the program I haven’t really had any time to think about whether I made the right choice, but I’m convinced I’m where I need to be.
Do you have a story to share about quitting Big Tech? If so, please reach out to the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.
