I have to disagree. Just in the last few years, tons of new, groundbreaking projects have sprung up. e.g. most of the publicly announced Google X projects didn'

I have to disagree. Just in the last few years, tons of new, groundbreaking projects have sprung up. e.g. most of the publicly announced Google X projects didn't even exist a few years ago. And there's so many areas where there's interesting stuff to work on. Now obviously, unless you're really special (e.g a known expert in your field) you're not going to be able to waltz in and be given a huge area of responsibility and a team, but that's just common sense. You do have to prove yourself, and there is some discounting down of your work pre-Google (your impact since Google is valued far more highly). At the end of the day, Google is a heavily engineering-driven company, so if you have good ideas, nothing is stopping you from going ahead and starting your own cool project. If you're driven and talented and demonstrate success, the 'cool project' could transform into something much bigger, and you could end up leading an important company initiative.