Career Advice About Google

I’m currently working as an L4 Machine Learning Engineer at a mid-sized public company, and I’ve recently finished L5 SWE interview with Google and am now in the hiring committee stage. The recruiter told me that my interview performance was mixed, so the chances for L5 are small, but L4 is possible. According to , I’m expecting around a 20% salary increase (and, of course, Google’s other benefits are much better than those at my current company). However, the new position is for a SWE role working on hardware products, which involves writing C++, a completely new technology and field for me.

Reasons for wanting to stay:

1. I have a good relationship with my manager and teammates, and the work is more interesting and aligned with my strengths. If possible, I still want to continue working as a Machine Learning Engineer in the future.
2. I’m working on software side projects and writing a blog, and I’m worried that after joining Google, these external projects might be restricted.

Reasons for wanting to leave:

1. Better salary and benefits, and a higher salary ceiling (it’s almost impossible to reach FAANG L5-level salary in my current job).
2. I was previously a Googler, so I’m familiar with Google’s culture (though I was laid off in 2023).
3. I have a poor relationship with my current skip manager. We have many technical disagreements, I don’t adapt well to his management style, and he has a negative impression of me.

This position is not in the U.S., so the chances of being laid off again should be lower (but who knows).

How should I evaluate these two options?

And, since my skip manager has a negative impression of me, should I actively look for other jobs, even if it's not Google?

I was a former startup founder and companies like FAANGMULA (Meta, Google, Apple in particular) have reached out to interview me for senior SWE positions, how should I chose any one company (these options or others), that I think might want me to recreate the type of IP that was in my startup paying me a salary instead of acquiring me (if I were to do my company again), which they can cheap out on? If my goal is to have my own company again someday, should I work somewhere else less related to my expertise (just need it to pay the bills for a few years before trying again)? Or do I go somewhere, think I can learn, won’t necessarily get promoted or get paid more and sacrifice my IP that these companies (or other smaller startups), could actually end up owning?

At a huge company at Google, there's resources on everything imaginable, including other trades like product management and sales (which I'm interested in). Does it make sense at this stage in my career to spend a lot of time looking into those and learning?

I'm a L4 at Google, and am TLing a project with 6 other SWEs. I was working on one of the implementation docs, and had to work on a Postmortem incident and its AIs. I sharded off some parts of the implementation to one of the SWEs in the project. I'm back into the project now, and the other SWE is making great progress and I want to let them take it to completion for credits attribution.

I'm confused on whether I should try to do most of the implementation for the designs I write myself or shard it off as other SWEs have a lot less on their plate in December, and early January. Could it be held against me in promo committees that I didn't handle a lot of implementation myself? My org has a high priority on lines of code written, which is causing this confusion.