Steve Francia joined Google 6 years ago and is the product leader of the Go language. Today he announced on his personal social platform that he will leave Google.
After 6 years, I will be leaving Google. I'm very proud of what the Go team has accomplished over the past six years, and I've never been more excited about the future of Go.
You may be unfamiliar with the name Steve Francia, but you will be impressed by his resume. Steve Francia has over 25 years of experience in open source, leading six major open source projects (Go, Docker, Hugo, MongoDB, Drupal, Cobra; of which he is the author of Hugo, Cobra, Viper and spf13-vim), he Also helped define Google's open source strategy and is a top 50 most popular engineer on Github.
Steve Francia joined the Go team 6 years ago with the goal of taking Go from a niche language to a mainstream, enterprise language. Looking back now, Steve Francia has accomplished, or even exceeded, that goal.
During this time, the Go team has delivered VS Code Go and Gopls, greatly improved the Go development experience, improved Go documentation, and improved the way developers install Go. The Go language has also evolved from being primarily written by Googlers to being mostly written by community contributors today.
The number of Go users has also grown tenfold during this period, and the frequency of Go users has increased from occasional to daily use. Today more than 75% of CNCF projects are written in Go.
With all these rich experiences and remarkable achievements, why did Steve Francia choose to leave Google at this time?
Steve Francia said in his personal blog:
With the last few Go releases, I've felt more and more that my journey with the Go team is coming to an end. When I first joined, there was a lot to learn about Go and working at Google, and (now) my learning rate has slowed down significantly. I'm stuck, I love the team and the work we're doing, but personally I'm feeling stagnant. With the release of Go 1.18, I feel like my mission on the Go team is done.
Steve Francia has revealed his whereabouts after leaving:
Looking back on my career, I have been very fortunate to be at the forefront of innovation in many different industries. Next I will focus on data science and machine learning. Two Sigma has been at the forefront of innovation in data science, distributed computing, and machine learning for the past two decades, with a deep investment in open source. I see their potential in advancing machine learning and data science, and feel the same excitement and excitement as when I first joined MongoDB, Docker, and Go. I am excited to join the talented team at Two Sigma.
I will miss my time at Google.