I moved from a 2/5 to a 4.5/5. Doesn't mean it was necessarily a satisfying move. There's 6 - great mission and product, which the first one had and the new job is weak in, but it factors for a lot more than the other 5 in attractiveness of the job, at least for me

This. I never understood The attractiveness of working for Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, etc. other then money. How is the Dev work there helping society at large?

Once, I got approached for a job at Amazon to help "build the next big e-billing system"... What an uninspiring thing to do.

I care little about what the product/impact is and mostly care about how interesting the work is on a technical level. I am pretty fond of theoretical research even when practical usage is very unlikely and did a math major mostly for fun. One thing the companies you listed share is large amounts of data and as I work in ML having large datasets is really nice to play with. Also large tech companies tend to have better data infrastructure and more time can be spent focused on ml tasks vs data engineering tasks. What the model actually does is of little interest to me and I've worked in a couple different ml areas now.

I do have an eventual interest to do research focused role, but interesting impactful research I think requires either high management (professor leading a large lab/research director) or making your own thing. The first I lack the experience for and the second doing a startup feels too risky to me today. If I was wealthy enough I would probably try making a research themed ai startup.

It depends on whether you care about the overall product or just the puzzles involved in the product.

I get my overall high level fix from outside of work activities, so work is enjoyable mostly for the little puzzles it generates every day. I am sure that there are some fascinating considerations for a mega e-billing system, even if it isn't all that interesting in itself.

Yes! But that isn't something that all (or even most?) companies have full control over.

Most people aren't going to be passionate about building, oh, I dunno, software for insurance companies, but it still needs to get done. There might be a handful of "disruptive" companies doing something in the space, but 99% aren't.

There's a lot more "boring" software (even in the startup world) that needs to be built than anything else. The problem is really that these companies don't seem to be self-aware and they don't adjust #1-#5 (especially #1) accordingly.

That's the thing, it is something companies have control over, if they have a dynamic and passionate CEO, and are willing to take on risk. Or at least, if it's a big established company, create pockets where groups are able to work on entirely new initiatives.

I feel like this is largely a myth propagated by business. If you feel powerless to control things like your pay or work life balance, then they control it by default. I found once I learned to set boundaries in my personal life that doing it at work was easy because I don’t have to care about an employer’s feelings and my income skyrocketed.