“The most important skill at a big company is figuring out what the political reality lets you actually ship.”
Osmani spent 14 years at Google and the post is the unfiltered version of what the job actually was. The good lessons. The technical wins. Also the parts about navigating performance reviews, surviving reorgs, and choosing battles. Most career advice from big tech is sanitized to the point of uselessness. This is not. Worth reading whether you work at a big company, plan to, or are trying to leave one.