Comment by CydeWeys

My experience with Google has been the opposite, for what it's worth. I've been rewarded for, as an IC SWE, starting conversations with random people across the entire company to make things happen, and then executing on it. I even presented my launch at I/O this past May. I think it helps that I'm on a smaller team. So from my experience, it still very much seems like a "look for something that needs doing and do it" kind of place. Maybe too much freedom is granted, in that a lot of "boring" things are languishing that shouldn't be simply because no one is interested in (or rewarded for) doing them.