{"id":743,"date":"2008-08-07T18:36:53","date_gmt":"2008-08-07T22:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/07\/california-here-i-come\/"},"modified":"2008-08-07T18:56:21","modified_gmt":"2008-08-07T22:56:21","slug":"california-here-i-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/07\/california-here-i-come\/","title":{"rendered":"California, here I come"},"content":{"rendered":"

As is probably not a surprise (especially after my New York vs. the Bay Area post<\/a>), I have decided to move back to the Bay Area next month. <\/p>\n

Taking a step back, at the beginning of the summer, I had just graduated from Columbia and was in need of some time off after the craziness of finishing the semester. I had three weddings to attend in California in a month, so I spent two and a half weeks in the Bay Area between May and June, and used it as a chance to catch up with many of my California friends. Seeing them made me realize how much I missed them all, and made me want to see them more often than once or twice a year. At the same time, I was starting to think about the next move in my career, since the “Software Management Training Program”<\/a> at Fog Creek was ending at the end of the summer. <\/p>\n

Putting the two together, I decided to move back to the Bay Area – many of my close friends are out there, the culture fits me better out there<\/a>, there are many more technology companies to choose from career-wise, the weather’s better, etc. But mostly it’s the people – people are what matter to me in the end, and many more people of my “tribe” are out there (notwithstanding the many outstanding people I’ve met here in New York like Grant<\/a>, Noah<\/A>, Charlie<\/a>, and my fellow Columbia students). <\/p>\n

Having decided that, it was just a matter of finding a job, and as of today, I have accepted an offer to work at Google in Mountain View. I will be an analyst on a sales finance team that develops revenue forecasting models to help Google executives make decisions. I was drawn to the position because I get to use both my quantitative skills<\/a> in building the models and my generalist skills in that the models are built on understanding everything from the technical product decisions being made, to sales and marketing strategies, to what customers and competitors are doing, to the larger economic and business environment. It will also be valuable if I decide to continue with the management track at some point, because executive managers have to understand the financials to be successful<\/a>, so it would behoove me to understand revenue at a micro- and macro- level. You can read about the Revenue Force team to which this team contributes in this New York Times article<\/a> which explains some of the contributions of Hal Varian as Google’s Chief Economist (Varian is also one of the authors of Information Rules<\/a>, which I read in preparation for my interview with him at Google). <\/p>\n

So that’s the plan. While I’m sad to be leaving New York, I went back and re-read my moving to New York post<\/a> from two and a half years ago, and I think I have gotten what I wanted to out of my New York experience:<\/p>\n