You did see the part about the four year stint at BigTech in between? Unless you think the second largest employee in the US is a “small little company”.

I also added an HN submission that made the front page a couple of days ago by a staff engineer at Google, did you notice the difference between how he didn’t really seem to need to prove his “impact”?

Finally, this isn’t r/cscareerquestions where you have a bunch of 22 year olds needing to prove themselves by mentioning “they work for a FAANG” (been there done that. Got the t-shirt. Didn’t like it)

As a principal at big tech I has essentially full autonomy to do what I thought was highest value with very little need to report anything.