In regards to the third point, I relate to the struggle. In my experience, the reason you're stuck is because you're still in the world of theory. And in the world of theory, you can spin in circles asking a million questions.

But once you move into the practical side, things change. Your questions get sharper because you're focused on actually building something, not just thinking about it. And when it comes to technical decisions, here’s what I’ve found works best: spend a bit of time thinking through the options, commit to one, and write the code. Just get it out there. Then, during the code review, you’ll get real feedback. People might say, “This is good, but here’s another way to do it,” and still approve it. That tells you there isn’t always a single correct answer. Especially as an intern, the kinds of technical decisions you're making probably won’t make or break the entire system. Most of the time, it’s just about trade-offs.

And if your decision turns out to be wrong, that's still a win. You’ll learn a ton from that. But if you want to get faster and better, the key is to pick one path, implement it, and then ask for feedback on actual code, not just hypotheticals.

Mid-Level Software Engineer [E4] at Meta

Ruba Sbeih

Not sure what the context is here, but one trick I find useful is buy time for yourself to collect your thoughts and calm down. For example, let's say you are talking with someone, and they say something that bothers you. Do the following:

- Say, "I'm sorry. I didn't quite understand. Could you repeat that?"
- **Don't listen to their answer.** Use the time they are repeating themselves to **calm down**. Think about their perspective. Why did they say that? Are they trying to help you? Is it feedback? Is it a comment on my work or on me personally? Most likely, it will be a comment on something you did or worked on, and not on you as a person. Given that, you should take their comment as feedback on your work, and not on you. 
- Thank them for their comment/feedback. 

I think in general emotional responses happen when you feel that your value as a person is tied to the work you do, so when someone comments on your work, it feels like a personal attack. You need to divorce your self-worth from your work in order to have a better work/life mindset. 

So, just speaking from personal experience, a lot of people in Big Tech come from startups. Big Tech tends to value that kind of background because startup folks usually learn really really fast. I’m not sure how it is at Google specifically, but at Meta, there is actually a term for people who leave Meta and come back since it is so common. They are called boomerangs. I'm assuming it's similar at other Big Tech companies. 

I personally know many people who worked at a FAANG company, left to try different startups, and eventually came back. Considering you are a staff engineer at Google, if you were to leave and work on a startup for a year and it didn’t work out, that wouldn’t hurt your resume at all. If anything, it would make it stronger. The fact that you are already senior and then went deeper by taking on the challenges of a startup, that to me stands out.

Also, in other discussions I have seen, people have talked about wanting to return to FAANG, and often they just reach out to a recruiter and got reinstated at their previous level. I can’t speak to the exact process for staff engineers, but I am pretty sure others who have done it could tell you more.

However, I would like to comment that the market is very tough right now, and if you value stability, then startup life is going to be crazy for you. So I think it's more of a question about how long are you going to be ok with instability? 

Honestly having a guaranteed Google offer sounds like a godsent in this market. I completely understand not wanting to mess up your career trajectory, but as someone who's struggled immensely to get a job (thousands of applications last year, just recently started at Meta, which was the ONLY, and I mean ONLY company that got back to me and invited me to the interview stage last year. Crazy right?), I would %100 go with a guaranteed offer and figure out how to deal with the career progression there.\
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Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Google's team matching take awhile anyway? You could take the L4, and still look for jobs in the meantime while you are in team matching?