[pradn]

Engineers at these companies are like little startups. Senior engineers are expected to take a general problem, nail down the ambiguity / get consensus, and own the project til launch and after. That includes writing docs, running meetings, getting other people to do stuff for you (approvals, coding), writing code, testing, and ops/oncall work. In this way, the role requires "vertical flexibility" - a lot of jobs in one product. It's not "horizontal flexibility" - being a programmer in a bunch of different projects. That's the general gist of it, but I suppose everything can vary given how big these companies are.

Still, we like to speak of all these companies in the same breath, but I feel like unless you worked at a few of them, it's hard to say what the actual commonalities/differences are.