The list of companies you give doesn't quite work. Bell Labs and Xerox Parc were small organizations within a larger company. The vast majority of people in th

The list of companies you give doesn't quite work. Bell Labs and Xerox Parc were small organizations within a larger company. The vast majority of people in the companies you listed are doing work that has nowhere near the density of interestingness that happened in Xerox Parc, for example. There might be individual departments in those companies that are comparable -- in Microsoft Research perhaps, and a sibling comment points out Alpha Go. Anyway, the point is: Working at Alphabet or Intel or any of these is nothing like working at Xerox Parc, unless you happen to be in a very special place within those companies. But then, such special places are bound to exist elsewhere as well, in particular in small startups that are doing genuinely interesting things.