Re:My Google job was tedious and pointless
by jondubois on Tuesday October 24, 2017 @05:19AM
(#15540287)
I disagree, most companies don't really 'grow' like you're suggesting. The odds of joining a company like AirBnB, DropBox, Facebook, etc... While in its early stages approaches 0% - There is a massive amount of luck involved. These kinds of learning opportunities are essentially impossible to come by.
However, if you switch companies often and work for a range of companies at different stages of development, then there is a very good chance that you will have the opportunity to learn about all the different stages of development without putting all your bets on one horse.
99.9% of the time, the single-company mindset that you're suggesting just gets people stuck in a rut (I've seen it). If you've had a different experience then you're one of the lucky ones.
Being adaptable and delivering a few one off features is junior engineering which senior engineers can coach through. Coding conventions differ from team to team, package to package adapting to these also doesn't mean you are a robust engineer. It means you are competent. Solid engineer are expected to adapt. All big software projects that stand the test of time have nuances and even possibly anti-patterns because the initial design missed something.
I'm not sure what you mean by "saw the kinds of companies I worked for" but if you worked at Google for 6 months, Facebook for 6 months and Amazon for 6 months it still wouldn't mean much to me. All it means is you are smart enough to get your foot in the door but not successful enough to succeed.