[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.