Keeping the polls to Google, Facebook, Amazon and others. Impact is - your work lead to a product which 20-30% of your companies' clients/users use. You contributed towards atleast 10% in terms of code/design.
'impactful' means? making money for employer? personal? environment? general users/public?
I believe my product (cancer diagnosis from mammograms) is going to be impactful (maybe even save a few lives), but its penetration will be nowhere near 20% of all Google users. Your definition of impact sucks:P
Yeah sounds more like impact within the company versus impact on actual number of people
Why within company? I'd say: Impact = quantity of people impacted * magnitude of impact per person Moving a UI button seen by 500M people is high on the first component. Accelerating a diagnosis of cancer in a handful of people is high on the second factor.
What does that criteria of at least 10% even mean ? Let's use MS Office as an example. I don't think anyone can claim they have written or designed 10% of the entire Office codebase. It's humungous.
Working on the next generation of infrastructure management
How are you defining impact? What if you make a small UI change that impacts 100 million people? What if you build out some infra that impacts internal systems tremendously but customers don’t know about?
I think the definition is subjective which is fine. I have updated the question with what impact means to me.
At Google you can have great objective impact both on users (product) or internally (infra) and even directly generate revenue, but you’ll still feel like you’re just a cog. I think you’re really asking about getting that sense of gratification — you will definitely not, on average, get that here, or likely any large company like those you listed.