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Google, here I come!

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This may be a somewhat unexpected announcement for many of you, but I’m delighted to announce that as of April 7th I will be an employee at Google. (If you really needed to follow that link to know who Google are, I have no idea what you’re doing reading my blog in the first place.)

This may seem an unusual move for someone who has been concentrating on C# for a while – but I view it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with some of the smartest engineers around on hugely exciting projects used by billions of people. Strangely enough, at the moment I don’t really know how to build an application which supports billions of users. I’m looking forward to finding out.

This is likely to mean an end or at least a temporary hiatus in my professional use of C# – but that doesn’t mean my interest in it will die out. I’m still looking forward to seeing what’s in C# 4 :) I’m likely to be using Java for my day-to-day development, which is at least familiar ground, and as Josh Bloch works at Google I’ll be in good company! (Do you think he’d trade a copy of the new edition of Effective Java for a copy of C# in Depth?)

I’ll be working in the London office, but will spend the first two weeks in Mountain View. I don’t yet know what I’ll be working on, but many of the projects in London are in the mobile space, so that seems a reasonable possibility. Whatever project I end up on (and it’s likely to change reasonably frequently) it’s hard to imagine that life will be dull.

It seems fitting to thank my wife Holly at this point for supporting me in this – my daily commute will be significantly longer when I’m at Google, which means she’ll be doing even more of the childcare, not to mention coping on her own while I’m in sunny California. She’s been a complete rock and never once complained about the extra burden I’ll be putting on her.

So, I’m currently a mixture of terrified and extremely excited – and I can’t wait to fly out on Sunday…

25 thoughts on “Google, here I come!”

  7. Congratulations. One of the best books I ever read on C# was your comments in the annotated standard ;)
    Funnily, I’ll be moving from c# to java within a few months. -Using an implementation without a decent debugger (mono) was just crappy.
    Perhaps you’ll pick up python? I would love to hear what you’d have to say about that…

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  8. Steen> You mean someone else has the annotated standard? Gosh! (That’s gotta be a seriously uncommercial starting point, to be honest. Shame, as it’s a great read for those who care. And the best annotations certainly weren’t mine, IMO – partly because I don’t have any “inside information” into *why* the language was designed the way it was.)

    Anyone who actually enjoyed reading a standard should at least consider getting C# in Depth. Some peer reviewers said it was a bit dry (but unavoidably so) during earlier drafts – but compared with a spec it’s light, fluffy reading.

    Jon

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  10. What a shame :-(

    Funnily enough, one of these imminent days I was going to ask you if you were interested in a position in the Parallel Computing Platform in Redmond…

    Oh well… Congratulations! (grudgingly :-))

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  11. Such a shame, the newsgroups won’t be the same without you.
    On the other hand, working for Google is probably one of the best positions a developer can find himself in these days, so its a very understandable decisions.
    Best of luck to you in the future!

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  12. I should clarify at this point: I’m very much hoping to keep posting on the newsgroups and my blog. I’ll probably have a bit less time to do so, and I *may* need to be very careful about which topics I talk about, but I certainly don’t want to leave the C# community!

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  13. Congratulations on your new job, and I do hope you’ll stay with the C# community! I’ve already pre-ordered “C# in Depth” and if you ever get around to write another C# book I promise to buy that one, too. :)

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  15. So, I guess that means you won’t be at the MVP Summit :(

    Not sure if you were planning to go before this, but if your first 2 weeks are going to be in Mountain View, that rules out you attending the Summit.

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  16. I wasn’t going to be at the summit anyway, although my original reason was that it was unfair to leave Holly at home with 3 little ones for a week. Now I’m doing it for 2 weeks! There’s a bit of a difference in terms of professional necessity, however…

    Jon

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  17. Congrats Jon! You’re day to day involvement in the C# community will be missed. But it’s an exciting opportunity for you! I still refer to your pages on C# from time to time…

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  19. Ah, so you’ve got a proper job at last – well done! I guess you may be bit busy now, but I do hope you find time to continue blogging. In particular it will be interesting to hear your views on the current state of Java and related technologies.

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  24. Nice one – best wishes for your new employment and you & your family.

    Im no fan of Java or Google so please do sort them out.

    PS leave your C# musings here I NEED THEM

    Thank You

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  25. I still can’t believe this. I am almost waiting for you to throw an April Fools joke on my face in tomorrow’s post.

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