This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gautami Nadkarni, 33, who lives in New Jersey. The following has been edited for length and clarity. In 2024, six years into my time at Google , I started questioning myself. I joined as a customer engineer in the Google Cloud org in 2018. My job was to design scalable cloud solutions that would help Google's enterprise customers manage their data and operations. At the time, cloud computing was the thing everyone in the industry was talking