after almost two decades(!), ginny mae is leaving google!

Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 1:12 PM

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Subject: after almost two decades(!), ginny mae is leaving google!
To: team
Bcc: random people I’ve worked closely with in the past

Hi y’all!

After 19.18 years working at Google, I’ve made the decision to not do that anymore.
My last day will be 2026-01-26.

I’d be delighted if you wanted to chat before I left - please throw a 1:1 on my calendar or send me a chat, I’d love to see you! (I also have contact info below for after I leave!)

Despite the siren’s call to send out a 17 page retrospective, I’m going to try to keep this brief and share the bits people would maybe read. Please think of this as my departing gift to you.

Where are you going? What’s next for Ginny?

Nowhere and I don’t know! I found a beautiful quote that doesn’t apply perfectly, but did a good job summarizing my thoughts:

I've come so far from my younger self that what I thought would define my entire life is just a little fraction of me. I feel I have something everybody deserves: a chance to move on.

Untethered from any hope of being a certain kind of person, being about what I think I should be about… I can just look around and see what grabs my interest.

What happens next? If I'm lucky, nearly everything.

Being a single parent and working a full time job left me with little energy left for what I wanted to do. So I’m going to let my creativity pick my path. Less ambiguously, some of the things I’ll play around with: writing (fiction and essays), making weird electronics with ESP32 boards, naps, creating weird websites… simply creating things without external expectation but because I want them to exist.

I’ll probably still do programming (or at least software design) because, much like a drug dealer, I’m an enabler: I thrive creating things that help folks create things… tools people value and enjoy using.

Why are you leaving?

There have always been lots of reasons to stay, and lots of reasons to leave. Slowly, the latter has grown much heavier than the former.

There are some overarching themes to the why, and I think these feel the most important and summarize best:

• Opportunity cost. Deep down I know I could be doing more and better things with the time I have left.

• Emotional cost. In the past few years of my life I’ve become less capable of ignoring the broader picture of the systems I participate in and contribute to. Google regularly makes choices which harm people I love, and a community I am a part of and hold close.

• A bunch of recent experiences broadly at Google have weighed on me in a way that made me less effective at my job. Even if it’s only in some contexts, small perceived transgressions routinely make folks become aggressively vengeful. It takes a lot of energy to make sure the most hostile misinterpretation of my opinions feel safe enough to share, and that discomfort bleeds into my work. Is a girl who can’t even bikeshed in a design doc review really a software engineer?^[1]

• As an individual contributor, I’ve been especially flaky and ineffective. It took almost all of 2025 to start to understand this as a symptom and not a failure of character or competence. All of the above and more weighed on me, and I found myself struggling to do even a bad approximation of my job - and the effects of that have a blast radius broader than myself.

Do you want to stay in touch?

Yes, very much so! In fact I have more than too many ways you can do so :D

~gm

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Footnotes

1. yes, she is, but where’s the fun? ↩︎