Comment by gilbetron

I've interviewed many current and ex Googlers, and one thing we've discovered is that we have to be careful overindexing on the scale and complexity of systems they work on. Google is insanely huge and complex, but have insane and complex tooling to help developers. "I worked on a project that affected 250 million users" is something we'll here and sounds amazing, but in reality, from their perspective, they spent months working through the complex Google dev, QA, and deployment process and pushed out a relatively straightforward change, but that change was for a massive system.

They have a unique and distinctive experience, but it usually isn't what you expect. It is rare to encounter someone from Google that actually built something of significance, and those that have are always at the staff+ level and had been there 10+ years.

If I were to make another generalization, the [g|x]ooglers that worked on relatively "small" projects are often the most interesting, as they had resources to build something from the ground up and do attempt some really interesting projects.