They do, but you likely won't be able to work on most of it. I think it's useful to distinguish between two types areas that innovation can happen from an engin

They do, but you likely won't be able to work on most of it. I think it's useful to distinguish between two types areas that innovation can happen from an engineer's perspective: 1. Product + technical work (e.g. Siri at Apple) 2. Pure technical work (e.g. chaos monkey at Netflix) Most of the product work at big companies is some combination of maintenance and keeping up the competition (our competitor implemented feature X and now we need it too!). Even for those features which are innovative the sprawling complexity of existing products means that even engineers nominally working on the innovative feature are not doing any innovative work themselves but are instead doing bog-standard data piping or UI work. For pure technical work, most of the low hanging fruit has already been grabbed. You genuinely need to be quite clever to not only identify big cross-cutting problems but also come up with a solution that meets all backwards compatibility requirements without putting too much of a burden on your fellow engineers. The key thing here is that this is true at more or less any medium to large company, it just falls out of the business dynamics. The lesson is that if you want your work to be interesting and innovative, target teams, not companies.