throwthrowaway

That's actually an interesting reply. Do you actually get paid to do, say, computer vision? If so, what's the ratio of enjoyable to menial work (please be honest)?

Also how do you manage to find jobs like this? I found that hiring managers tend to, like, lie about the jobs. What I mean is there's no shortage of interestingly-sounding job descriptions out there that have nothing in common with what the hired person actually supposed to do. And you can't know the day-to-day reality of any job before you'll actually get it and then it's too late. How do you work around this situation?

I'm in London. There are plenty of jobs around here and I don't feel that it's a place thing. It just feels like a state of the affairs in the whole industry. I always give example of VisiCalc being written by two people from scratch. On one hand, they didn't had the modern tooling, on the other hand, imagine doing a similar project today — no way it would be pulled off by just two guys.

No-no, this is not about passion. When one joins Facebook this does not mean he or she works on "social networking", it means he or she works on a tiny portion of a massive Facebook's codebase, implementing, say, a layout of a targeted ad for Chinese users.

I don't want to say anything is wrong with Facebook in this situation, it's just a company with a huge product and 7000+ employees. You are almost guaranteed to be re-inventing the wheel "Facebook way" there.