Google went to being a work/life balance company around 2017/2018. I remember talking with an ex-colleague about it at that time. (Ironically, back then I was

Google went to being a work/life balance company around 2017/2018. I remember talking with an ex-colleague about it at that time. (Ironically, back then I was off founding startups and he was working at Google, while now he's laid off and I'm back at Google.) IMHO interesting CS work today is being done at OpenAI and Anthropic in the machine-learning space, the Ethereum Foundation and maybe Polygon or Cardano in the crypto space, and that's pretty much it. FANGs have not been hot in a decade. Google is where you go to have babies. Amazon is where you go to get a FANG on your resume. Apple is where you go to join a cult and enjoy a continually-rising stock price as a result. Meta is where you go if you want more money and are willing to be morally flexible to get it. Microsoft is...Microsoft, but they're getting pretty good at the continually rising stock price like Apple, so there's that. Netflix isn't even a FANG anymore, and NVidia doesn't treat their software engineers particularly well since hardware is their core competency.