When I was a student, I had a picture in my head of what working at a big tech company would be like. It came from the places any student's picture comes from: open-source projects, side projects, and coursework. That picture turned out to be accurate about some things and completely off about others.
None of that is a knock on the job. It's just that the day-to-day of large-scale engineering is genuinely different from what smaller-scale work prepares you for, and most people don't find that out until they're in it.
So if you're a student, a new grad, or someone eyeing the jump, here's the honest picture of what it's actually like. Not the recruiting version. The real texture of the work.
Most of the design is already done
In school, almost every project starts from a blank page. Build a distributed system. Model this domain. Pick an architecture and defend it. The blank page is the whole point — you're being taught to make decisions.
