I was at Google for five years, and by the end of it, I'd reached a similar place as you. Alas, my leaving Google was precipitated by us deciding to move, not a well-thought or self-directed intentional impulse on my part. But it turned out to be the best thing ever. For some reason or other, I had the interview day of my life at Square, and got offered a position where they expected a lot from me. It has been wonderful, and I should have switched companies sooner.
Leading up to that, part of my path out of the doldrums was (a) therapy, and (b) going through the list of technical subjects that seemed out -of-reach-wizardly (writing a compiler, writing an emulator), and chipping away at them one plush, cushy Google bus ride at a time until they were working. But the change of scenery — and especially of expectation — was invigorating.
A few miscellaneous comments (“advice is a form of nostalgia”…):
- the feeling that you're only idling at 10% mental capacity will kill you slowly.
- you might want to investigate the idea that you're procrastinating because of anxiety or depression, rather than the reverse
- assuming you're giving programming interviews, and using borg/bigtable/cns/etc/etc/etc day-to-day, you'll be amazed at how much knowledge you've picked up in 6 years. You probably have a practical fluency with distributed and sharded capacity design that most interviewees lack. Depends on where inside Google you landed…
- just preparing for and attempting the interviews at “companies with a higher hiring bar than Google” will probably wake you up a bit. Good luck!
> just preparing for and attempting the interviews at [better companies]
This really rings true, I attempted and utterly failed an interview recently and was a real kick up the arse to improve myself - I'm no longer the hot shit I was 10 years ago.
Leading up to that, part of my path out of the doldrums was (a) therapy, and (b) going through the list of technical subjects that seemed out -of-reach-wizardly (writing a compiler, writing an emulator), and chipping away at them one plush, cushy Google bus ride at a time until they were working. But the change of scenery — and especially of expectation — was invigorating.
A few miscellaneous comments (“advice is a form of nostalgia”…):
- the feeling that you're only idling at 10% mental capacity will kill you slowly.
- you might want to investigate the idea that you're procrastinating because of anxiety or depression, rather than the reverse
- assuming you're giving programming interviews, and using borg/bigtable/cns/etc/etc/etc day-to-day, you'll be amazed at how much knowledge you've picked up in 6 years. You probably have a practical fluency with distributed and sharded capacity design that most interviewees lack. Depends on where inside Google you landed…
- just preparing for and attempting the interviews at “companies with a higher hiring bar than Google” will probably wake you up a bit. Good luck!