I'm moving back to New York!
When I started at Google in December 2024, my team was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I moved to Somerville while Holly stayed in Bayside. A year of long distance, driving 4 hours each way on weekends, taking turns visiting. It was always supposed to be temporary, but "temporary" doesn't mean much when you don't have a concrete plan to leave.
Here's the thing about Google: you can't just say "I want to move to a different office." You have to find a team in that office that wants you, go through a transfer process, and hope it all works out. Your current team has to be OK with it. The new team has to want you. It's way more complicated than just changing your desk.
I started exploring my options around the fall of 2025. I'd been on the ad infrastructure team for about a year and had shipped some big projects. But to move back to NYC, I needed a team based there. After a lot of conversations and internal networking, I found a fit on a Google Cloud team working on storage infrastructure, a completely different product area, going from ads to cloud.
The transfer went through in January 2026. I'm now on the Cloud team working on caching features for Google Cloud Storage, writing Angular, TypeScript, and Java. Completely different domain from ads, which is both exciting and slightly terrifying. New codebase, new team, new product area. But honestly? Starting over is kind of my thing at this point.
We got a bigger apartment together in Bayside in December 2025 and I moved back. No more long distance! Being close to family again, being able to take the subway, eating real pizza instead of whatever they serve in Somerville. A year apart made us both appreciate what we had even more.
The Cambridge office was good to me though. The jazz jam, the bike lanes, the people on my ads team. I'll miss all of it. But New York is home.