I joined google after self-interrupting my academic path. Later I realized that Matt Welsh was the guy who wrote the first Linux manual I ever had (https://www.mdw.la/papers/linux-getting-started.pdf) which was pretty much the gateway for me learning what I needed to to work at Google.

My goal in joining google was to treat it as academia and use my position there to return to a stronger position in academia. I didn't manage to do this, but I was a more productive researcher as a SWE at Google than I ever was working in academia.

For a while Google wasn't just disneyland for nerds- it was nerdtopia. It was the first place I worked that had more people who were more nerdy than me. At first that was great but eventually it got tiresome.