If one gets to GOOG / FB on relatively high - L5/L6 level - can he be sure that his role will be creating some new stuff, as opposed to maintenance / working on some other people's code?
L5, no. L6 you’re mostly expected to come up with the “new stuff”.
“Creating new stuff” for its own sake is silly; some challenges require new solutions, some require improving existing products/infra.
Noone is arguing for "creating new stuff" for it's own sake. All I'm trying to do is to set some expectations. I know working for these companies is very rewarding financially. The question is - is it rewarding professionally? Just to add some context. I am working for relatively big company right now, and it has some benefits, but professionally - it's pretty depressing. Whatever new I am learning I am doing on my own, and it doesn't involve VMware in any way. Several jobs ago, though, I worked for a smaller company, it's name probably won't tell you anything, but technically they were doing incredibly interesting stuff.
Then why not trying smaller companies again?
Don't pooh-pooh maintenance.
That's the stage where software spends at least 80% of it's life.
Scaling and maintaining existing things with real customers already using it while not interrupting their experience is typically much more challenging than building something new with zero dependencies. Rather than setting the expectation that "not new product" is necessarily unfulfilling work, maybe think it terms of whether it's growing, or just on life support.
at fb, impact is #1, maintenance has little impact here.
At fb unless you are hard preallocated you get to choose teams in boot camp. you can make your criteria whatever you want.
hiring managers will keep telling you big scope and impactful projects, but after you join, you will find existing engineers have worked on those projects for a while. you have to find your own projects.
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