Everything below is my own personal opinion and doesn't represent Google, etc. I've been at Google for 2.5 years and am the tech lead of a small team. My prio

Everything below is my own personal opinion and doesn't represent Google, etc. I've been at Google for 2.5 years and am the tech lead of a small team. My prior work experience was internships and a startup (which I sold after about a year on it in grad school and another year on it full time). I've done a combination of boring plumbing stuff, moderately interesting plumbing stuff, very interesting mathy stuff (figuring out how to make place ratings better), applied ML stuff (for local review spam and quality), and crowdsourcing optimization stuff (making the humans who do manual things to maps data more efficient). I'd say the interestingness of my projects has probably been above average, but not exceptionally so.