You might be right about onboarding to FAANG tooling. I was pretty surprised at how complex it was to build a non-trivial backend service at Google: the abstrac

You might be right about onboarding to FAANG tooling. I was pretty surprised at how complex it was to build a non-trivial backend service at Google: the abstractions used by our chosen internal framework were not straightforward and it took some serious mental effort to wrap my head around everything, despite being familiar with Rails and Spring and the like. Of course once I figured out the tools I was able to create massively scaled stuff much more productively than I could with any open-source tooling. But if I was just a little less smart I might have never figured it out at all. Personally I don’t think my mental “versatility” got too much exercise there, except maybe in rescuing production systems in emergencies. But presumably if you stick enough smart people together someone will eventually invent something novel and profitable, even if the median employee never does.