I'd been at Microsoft until a couple of months before I started looking seriously. There was the return-to-office mandate, work that didn't interest me, leadership I'd lost faith in, and on-call rotations that were starting to affect my health. Eventually it all added up to a clear decision to leave. I didn't rush into applying everywhere, though. I spent two weeks getting my LeetCode back up first, focusing on the patterns that reliably come up at the top companies: dynamic programming, graph traversal, system design. It's not enjoyable, but I'd done it before and knew what to expect. I only applied to a handful of companies, all through their career sites. Google was one of them. I applied directly through the website and heard back quicker than I thought I would. To my surprise, they skipped the phone screen and put me straight into a virtual onsite. Five interviews in one long day: coding rounds, system design, and a behavioral one. The interviewers were sharp and the questions were hard. I felt okay about most of it but left unsure, which is pretty much how everyone feels after a Google loop. Forty-two days after I applied, the offer showed up: over $360,000 in total comp for the first year, a hybrid role out of ↓
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