Thanks this is really illuminating, how did you find projects like this? Where did u get the visibility to be able to find problems like this that were priorities for leadership?
It was quasi-assigned to me (I had the option not to work on it, but management would've been disappointed with that).
Management thought of me specifically because I'd built a reputation as someone who could tackle difficult projects, particularly those surrounding browser UI. I'd worked on the last 3 visual redesigns of Google Search (as the first engineer of the 2010 one, a consultant for the 2011 one, and the tech lead of the 2013 one), plus I started the Authorship project within Search, plus I'd done a bunch of little visual easter eggs like the [let it snow] holiday one (also a project that many people thought was impossible because it was started after the last binary push of the year). Management takes note of who delivers; it takes a while to get noticed, but once you are you get all the high-profile projects.
