Employee Number Four: Loving and Leaving Google

For fans of Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, a satirical memoir in which Google’s fourth employee recounts first navigating a tumultuous childhood, then finding herself in a front-row seat as her brilliant friends make high-tech history—and change the world.

With her spotty work history and seemingly useless art degree, Heather Cairns was not an obvious hire for a tech start-up that would one day change the world as we know it. But Cairns’s turbulent, lower-middle-class upbringing and various lousy e...