Especially that one. I'll bet they know, by now (maybe they already did, and don't care. Google is famous for leveraging their -and our- data).
I've found that many corporations are willing to settle for fairly mediocre work, as long as the processes are followed, and the cheese not moved. Having especially brilliant folks in place, means that if there is a problem, they have the bandwidth to deal with it. If I were your manager, I'd probably be pretty happy to have you there, but I'd also be worried that you weren't being challenged, and see if there was something I could do to challenge you, while improving my department's lot (I would probably do some kind of "20%" project).
TBH: Most work is fairly rote. R&D departments are usually pretty small. Production is about a predictable, low-variance workflow.
What I did, was work on some open-source stuff. Some of it has turned out to be quite impactful.
But I was fortunate. I had an employment contract that didn't have the "shower clause" (where they lay claim to the ideas that you come up with in the shower).
I strongly suspect that your contract has a "shower clause."
So, just to be clear, if you are working for any corporation, in any job, the corporation has full rights to all your work, and all your ideas, by law?
This explains why Germans always seemed so surprised when I mentioned my extracurricular work to them.
Must make moonlighting difficult.
Also, I’m almost positive that the reason my company did not have the clause, was because they hired many high-level creative folks, with lifelong side businesses.
Context helps. It isn't a trivial datam. S/Google/Army/g the responses would vary wildly regarding the military industrial complex, impact of contributing to it, etc.
I think cruising along at Google is extremely different to cruising along as a minor regional tech company.
If you're at Google you're already clearly gifted and one of the leading people in your industry, and if you're cruising there then you're probably still doing absolutely stellar work.
I think people overestimate the proportion of equally talented engineers that don't apply to the FAANGs of the world for personal (geographic) reasons.
That's not quite what I argued though - I said if you're at Google then you're certainly extraordinarily talented and you're going to be a leader in your field. You may be that elsewhere of course, but you'd certainly be that at Google. I didn't say that if you weren't at Google you wouldn't be talented.
You may not recognize it, but this is a statistical distribution argument. :) It is assuming that there is a steep gradient between Google and "outside-of-google".
It is hard to prove that this is true regardless of the intentions of the statement or what was left unsaid.
