I see this argument a lot and it always feels like an over-literal interpretation. Let me ask you a question -- what proves your ability to work on scale as an

I see this argument a lot and it always feels like an over-literal interpretation. Let me ask you a question -- what proves your ability to work on scale as an engineer? Is it the scale of the problem, or the scale of your solution? Outside of "Google scale" logging is a nearly trivial, solved problem. If the only thing that creates the "challenges of scale" is your data cardinality, guess what. You're only solving problems of scale in the most literal (and maybe trivial) sense. Working on that at Google isn't going to prepare you for how to architect a platform for a startup that scales from 0 to 1 million active users over night without breaking a sweat. I am biased in that I care about the latter kind of scale and effectively couldn't care less about the former, because the latter is generally an existential problem to have, while the former is a nice problem to have.