[maxander]

At the risk of stating the obvious- it doesn't matter how innovative a company is as a whole, it matters how innovative what you're doing is. SpaceX does some really cool stuff, say, but you're not a rocket scientist- managing their financial software wouldn't be cooler than it would be for anyone else's. Conversely, Snapchat is just a goofy app for teenagers, but whoever writes the facial tracking system they use in their photo filters is doing some neat science. I don't know what the insides of Google are like, but I would bet that if there's anywhere a mid-career programmer can gain some interesting new skills on the job, it's probably somewhere in there- and that will get you a more interesting position, whether you stay or go elsewhere in the longer run.

[aserafini]

I respectfully disagree with this. Doing something cool in your day-to-day work can still be depressing if your personal values are not alligned with the organisation's.

For example, I was once offered the opportunity to work on low-latency software that identifies users as they move between websites (fingerprinting in ad tech speak). There are tons of cool CS problem around this, but in the end I turned it down.

Now I do ostensibly 'boring' CRUD work for a large eCommerce marketplace company. But it's an honest business model that benefits both sides of that market and I feel happier than I would have been in ad tech.

[maxander]

Sure, but company ethic is a different axis from innovative-ness. It sounds like you chose to work at an ethical-but-conventional position over an unethical-but-innovative one, and good on you for it. But you can have both (or neither) at once, too. Where Google falls on the ethics dimension is a good question, but that didn’t seem to be the poster’s complaint.

[cyphunk]

part of what is interesting in a job is what you do day-to-day, but also part of it is what the company does day-to-day. There are plenty of companies, most of them smaller, that seem much more interesting a place to work on the second quality