I left Google in January 2025 at the end of my maternity leave. That had never been my plan, but when my relocation request got unexpectedly denied (to another Google office my organization already had a presence in, not remote, yep I’m still bitter), I quit.

Figuring out what I wanted

I spent the next few months on a job search that was alternately rewarding and frustrating. I rebuilt my website and built an autogenerated resume as proof-of-competency projects, all while caring for my baby full time. (I had support, though: my in-laws watched him a few hours a week while I applied for jobs and did interview prep, and my husband took the rest of his paternity leave, a few weeks, in February. It was still the most isolating period I’ve experienced.) I spent a lot of that time trying to figure out what I actually wanted. At first I thought I could make it work with a flexible full-time job, but I just couldn’t bring myself to accept any of the full-time offers I got. So I regrouped and focused on part-time work instead, so I could still spend a good portion of the working week with my baby.

What I found is that it’s incredibly hard to land a part-time job, much less one outside of your network. And while I’d assumed working at Google would give me a built-in network for the rest of my life… almost all of the people I considered my network were still at Google, and therefore not in a position to offer me another job. And I had no interest in trying to get re-hired at Google.

Taking a risk

Throughout my search, I received and declined various offers that just weren’t the right fit for various reasons. (One company’s founder explicitly asked if I had kids during the interview process, for example.) The hardest part was choosing between two very good offers. One was a part-time freelance gig that seemed like truly the ideal gig. At the same time, I was wrapping up a long interview process for a full-time job at a midsize company that seemed about as good as full-time could get: interesting work, a great team, and a real focus on work-life balance. The part-time role was also interesting, but it was so different from anything I’d done before that it felt like more of a risk. I decided on the freelance gig, and declined to continue the midsize company’s interview process.

That contract abruptly ended after only two months, when political infighting I didn’t have much visibility into stopped work on the product I was hired to document. But I barely had time to be upset about it, or to regret taking it in the first place: a week after I heard it was ending, I got a cold LinkedIn DM from one of Fern’s founders, who was looking for a technical writer contractor.

Starting at Fern

Fern is a developer tools company that generates SDKs and docs sites from API specs. I replied to the DM promptly, we chatted for 30 minutes, and I started a week later, in June 2025. They were cool with part-time, and I’ve operated on pretty much exactly the schedule we discussed in that initial chat. Fern accepted my hourly rate with no negotiation. (And I raised my rate a few months later; everyone was okay with that.)

Fern had never had any kind of technical writer before, and the documentation was incomplete and outdated. That was a particularly bad look for a company whose product is literally a documentation platform. I inherited an enormous document of pasted-in Slack threads and links to customer-reported bugs, and beyond that, I was added to a few threads a day of customers complaining about documentation-related problems. Three weeks in, I was in New York with the team relaunching a fully revamped documentation site.

A year later, I still get tagged on documentation-related customer Slack threads, but it’s more like 2-3 a week now versus 5-6 a day when I first started, even as Fern’s customer base has expanded (more enterprise customers too, with more complicated needs). The documentation works.

Expanding my scope

For my first 4 months at Fern, I did the technical writing and documentation workflow optimization work that I was hired for. Then, in October, there was a lull in product launch content: the person covering it also owned all of business operations, and he no longer had time to write. On October 22, midday, I was asked if I could write a draft. (I had zero marketing experience at this point, and certainly none at Fern.) My first blog post went live the following day.

From then on, I owned product launch content, and my ownership kept growing from there. Today, it covers all of Fern’s documentation and technical marketing content: case studies, blog posts, product launches, SEO content, social media (LinkedIn/X) copy, Slack blast copy, and the occasional email. I do a lot of writing, but just as much editing, nitpicking, and collaborating with engineers.

Unsurprisingly, a big part of my job now involves AI. I’ve been making our docs agent-friendly: tagging content that only AI agents should see, structuring page metadata so agents can decide what’s worth fetching, and constantly iterating on the agent configuration for our own docs repo. I recently built an internal automation that scans our code repos every 24 hours, evaluates which merged PRs need a docs update, and posts a draft docs PR to Slack. I built a public repo of docs skills our customers can drop into their own projects, and I help configure Fern Writer, our AI writing agent. For my own work, I have an arsenal of Claude skills covering everything from factchecking SEO blogs to drafting case studies from interview notes. And I blog about technical writing and my own AI-assisted workflow for Fern, which means my workflow has itself become content (it’s all very meta).

Owning content at Fern has been the most fun I’ve ever had with a job. It’s very satisfying to write the documentation, then use that documentation as a starting point for a longform blog post, then figure out how to pull out the key point for a LinkedIn post or Slack blast. And all of those assets link to each other: you click it, I wrote it.

Postman acquired Fern in January, but my role has stayed pretty much the same.

A year in

I’m still a contractor by choice, and I work part time, around 25 hours a week with some work travel. I spend every morning and all day Friday with my 2-year-old.

I thought I was leaving the best job I’d ever had when I left Google; I can now say that isn’t true. I had a great time at Google and it was a great fit for me until it suddenly wasn’t a fit at all. At Fern, I’m doing work I would never have been able to do at Google or any other big company. It moves at the pace of a startup, and yet it fits with my life. I’m many times more focused and efficient than I ever was pre-kid.