Why do so many people in the tech industry have so little respect for their peers who work elsewhere in the industry?
The idea that large companies aren't solving hard problems, that that's only being done at startups, and that large companies are 'one trick ponies' is just incredibly myopic. Have you worked at a large publicly traded tech company?
Sure, in any business a bunch of the systems will be trivial. In larger businesses - especially ones that have grown through acquisition - there's also some scaling-law complexity that means they have to also do a bunch of annoyingly trivial work gluing together lots of duplicative and redundant trivial systems. When you look in from the outside of a large business that mess can definitely obscure the fact that at the heart that stuff is all in support of, usually, several significant and impressive engineering achievements, which support and drive that business forward. And they're probably performing operations that, from the outside, you would hear the name of and think 'well, that doesn't sound very difficult'.
I'm going to give a non-software example, that I think might show a little bit of an analogy for how 'engineering' at big companies can be at the same time operating at a complexity you wouldn't imagine, and yet be accomplishing something you might think from the outside is totally trivial.
See that workshop? Those precision engineered toolheads they call 'hearts' are the punch+die sets that they use to cut sprocket-holes in film. Everything there is bespoke, custom-made, and meets constraints you would never have thought of. It's engineered.
Software engineering in large companies is like that. If you don't think that banks contain software systems as complex and carefully engineered as those hearts? Or that manufacturing control software isn't in the same league? Or that the inventory management systems that drive a large retail business aren't on that level? You just have no idea what engineering is.
My point stands, particularly w.r.t. individual software engineers. Do you think any of the companies you mentioned had one, or even two/three engineers build the complicated marvels you are talking about? Do you think they would incur the risk of that as public companies? I am willing to bet the answer is 'no', particularly in this day and age.
The point of the original question isn't whether products as a whole are complex and hard, it's whether an individual engineer will get to do fairly large, complex systems.
The idea that large companies aren't solving hard problems, that that's only being done at startups, and that large companies are 'one trick ponies' is just incredibly myopic. Have you worked at a large publicly traded tech company?
Sure, in any business a bunch of the systems will be trivial. In larger businesses - especially ones that have grown through acquisition - there's also some scaling-law complexity that means they have to also do a bunch of annoyingly trivial work gluing together lots of duplicative and redundant trivial systems. When you look in from the outside of a large business that mess can definitely obscure the fact that at the heart that stuff is all in support of, usually, several significant and impressive engineering achievements, which support and drive that business forward. And they're probably performing operations that, from the outside, you would hear the name of and think 'well, that doesn't sound very difficult'.
I'm going to give a non-software example, that I think might show a little bit of an analogy for how 'engineering' at big companies can be at the same time operating at a complexity you wouldn't imagine, and yet be accomplishing something you might think from the outside is totally trivial.
Jump to this timestamp in the recent Smarter Everyday video about Kodak's film manufacturing line: https://youtu.be/mrJP82ZZiag?t=1742
See that workshop? Those precision engineered toolheads they call 'hearts' are the punch+die sets that they use to cut sprocket-holes in film. Everything there is bespoke, custom-made, and meets constraints you would never have thought of. It's engineered.
Software engineering in large companies is like that. If you don't think that banks contain software systems as complex and carefully engineered as those hearts? Or that manufacturing control software isn't in the same league? Or that the inventory management systems that drive a large retail business aren't on that level? You just have no idea what engineering is.