Just wanted to say that you've hit on a real problem: the rich-get-richer feedback cycle in which all the good projects are taken by high ranking engineers. On my teams, including at Google, we intentional counteracted that by giving the interesting work to the person just barely qualified to do it, and biasing the crud toward the senior team members.
This is why it is much better for younger engineers to work at smaller companies working on interesting ideas but if you wanna get google pay, then you gotta make those sacrifices.
