Recovering from an Allergy That Ended My Google Career – How Do I Start Over?
Three years ago, I was bitten by a lone star tick and developed an allergy to mammal products. It was misdiagnosed as a severe autoimmune disorder for three years. During that time, I was mostly bedridden and on medication — no projects, degrees, or work to show for it. After discovering the true cause, I’ve recovered, but my career is in disarray.
I graduated from the University of Waterloo and spent six years at Google working on the search stack. I was very happy with my trajectory before getting sick.
Now, the job market feels completely different from what I remember. How can I restart my career?
1) Should I mention my medical leave on my resume, or wait until an interview to explain?
2) I’ve relocated to a lower cost-of-living area and have personal ties here — what are my chances of finding a US remote role with compensation comparable to my previous position?
3) How should I best prepare for interviews? I enjoy reading textbooks and want to start doing personal projects again.
4) What back-end engineering skills are most in demand right now?
5) What are effective ways to network beyond my existing LinkedIn, college, and work connections? Discord seems active, but meetups and conferences feel less helpful.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read and respond.
1. It's kind of up to you but it will come up. The advantage of putting it on there is that you can pre-prepare an answer rather than having to have the awkward conversation.
2. I would say zero. You might get lucky and find a high-paying remote role to apply for but the market is "basically everyone" so the competition is high. FANG salaries were always higher than the majority of the market and now they are pivoting back to in office, the remote job market is no longer buoyed by their influence.
3. Yeah I mean you will need some evidence that you've got technical skills left and that you're passionate about software development. Tangible evidence is useful - "I read Hacker News" is not so much.
4. This is not as helpful a question as you might think on a one-to-one-basis. You actually only need one job and there's jobs in every area. By the time you've upskilled on that one area, the job will have changed. Find something you're passionate about and put that in your portfolio/CV/GitHub/GitLab. (You may not end up in that industry but it'll be attractive to employers anyway)
5. They're less helpful, but you'd be doing it in addition to the other stuff. Meetups are definitely worth doing. Conferences will generally answer question 4.
Since you worked on search at Google, I feel like you might be in high demand at one of the smaller search places. For example, there is a meta-search engine called Kagi which is looking for remote workers, and they mostly get results from Google and Bing but they also have their own small index which they are working on growing.
I feel like they might love to have you, it would be like they poached an employee from one of the “big guys”, but without as much effort.
Since you are interested in search engines and worked at Google, I’d like to get your thoughts on this article: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline
Good luck!