I have plenty of friends at FAANGs, and I've visited plenty of times. I am not sure why you'd presume I have a weird impression. I'm also not sure why you're p

I have plenty of friends at FAANGs, and I've visited plenty of times. I am not sure why you'd presume I have a weird impression. I'm also not sure why you're presume autonomy brings fulfillment. All job offers I had gave plenty of autonomy. I'd take genuine community over autonomy in most cases. People are social creatures. I'm also not sure why you'd presume I work at a startup. I work at a large and ancient not-for-profit many times older than FAANG. I work on an internal startup-like project. What they historically did was super-labor-intensive, and you can do it better integrate digital technology and big data. People can do more, better. I'm trying to do that. To be clear: (1) I don't have an NDA, and I can openly talk about what I do. I don't need to keep secrets. (2) My work will help people in significant and visible ways. (3) It's technically fascinating (and I can publish research papers on anything I do). That's not an abstract Google/startup/tech transform the world: ("At BILLINGLY DOT COM, we are changing lives by TRANSFORMING HOW PEOPLE DO BILLING"), but having direct, positive impact, potentially on millions of lives. Right now, I'm doing pilots, so it's impacting a few individuals, but if those are successful, the organization can take this to scale. There are surely such projects at FAANG too, occasionally, but they're rare, often highly political, often incompetently done, and it's not the offer I had.