For a decade, I've gone after the most interesting thing I could find without regard for visibility. My current job is the most interesting thing I've done so far, but it's likely that my employer won't disclose my current project until after another company publicly discloses they're doing the same thing. Looking at how that's worked for other systems/infrastructure projects around here, I doubt I'll be able to talk about my job for N years, where N is a significant fraction of a decade.
Now that I'm a year out from my previous job, I can talk a bit about what I did back in the 2010 timeframe. By the time I'm able to talk about what I did for them in 2012, it will be ancient history.
And yet, my career has been full of interesting work and I regularly get inquiries for neat sound jobs based on (as far as I can tell) nothing more than my having a pulse. It's true that, on occasion, someone who's familiar with my work contacts me. But much more often, it's someone who has no idea what I've done who's desperate to hire because, nowadays, everyone is desperate to hire.
I expect that, one day, the job market will cool down and I'll have a bit of trouble finding something I really enjoy. But, from where I am now, the tradeoff seems worth it, even if that day is tomorrow.
Some of the most interesting things I have ever worked on I will probably never be able to talk about. I worked on airborne surveillance radar signal processing algorithms (MTI and SAR), and that is about as far as I can go. Really sucks sometimes, too, because I hear about many similar "new" problems on here that we were dealing with years ago.
While I was in that black hole[1], though, I got bupkis in the way of inquiries if I didn't publish my resume on Monster or Dice. Even then I rarely got anything but clueless, spammy recruiters. It took me almost two years of active searching to get out of there. Being in that black hole in the first place was a serious impediment to getting out of it.
Yes and no. Yes, he could say "I work for AmaGooFaceSoft on a new type of infrastructure product which most companies can't even conceive of but which makes a lot of sense when you have 10,000 engineers and several hundred thousand servers." Then the question is "Oooh ooh what kind of infrastructure product is that?" and the answer will be "Do you remember Map/Reduce or BigTable or Hiphop? It's spiritually similar to those but totally unlike any of them and if I tell you any more my boss will have my guts for garters. Really cool tech though. You'd love to hear about it... if you worked here. Of course, if I told you about it, you'd not understand half of the explanation, since it plugs into four other proprietary systems that you -- as a member of the general public -- will never know about."
That gives anyone looking to employ me an idea of what I've been up to and what skills I bring to the table without giving away the keys to what my previous employer was doing. It may provide some tantalizing hints, but there's pretty much nothing useful there for a competitor to replicate it.
The whole thing is a joke. All of the big tech companies leak like sieves and it hurts nothing. MapReduce? BigTable? GFS? Hardly secrets at the time they were being worked on, not secret at all by the time they were in use, and completely public knowledge very shortly afterwards (not a "better part of a decade" like the comment above talks about). Same is true of virtually every project of note.
The vast majority of these projects wouldn't even help a competitor if you begged them to use it. Heck, a lot of these top secret skunkworks projects end up hurting the companies they're built for. They're unpolished, highly proprietary, and shoved down people's throats. The difference is often just that they're somewhat hidden causing people outside ascribe magic powers to them.
It's no wonder at all why companies foster secrecy. It makes everyone feel special and important. Good for morale and it costs nothing. Still a total load of bs 99% of the time.
I think secrets are like startups: the vast majority of them are worth nothing, but once in a while there will be one that's worth billions, and you usually can't predict which one that will be. So big companies try to keep everything secret just so they have this large portfolio of things they know that their competitors don't.
The vast majority of stuff I've worked on has been quite useless, but some of it has made millions of dollars, and it was very often the stuff that I thought was throwaway code or an interesting diversion that survives. Usually it's little details and not broad areas of work, though.
Now that I'm a year out from my previous job, I can talk a bit about what I did back in the 2010 timeframe. By the time I'm able to talk about what I did for them in 2012, it will be ancient history.
And yet, my career has been full of interesting work and I regularly get inquiries for neat sound jobs based on (as far as I can tell) nothing more than my having a pulse. It's true that, on occasion, someone who's familiar with my work contacts me. But much more often, it's someone who has no idea what I've done who's desperate to hire because, nowadays, everyone is desperate to hire.
I expect that, one day, the job market will cool down and I'll have a bit of trouble finding something I really enjoy. But, from where I am now, the tradeoff seems worth it, even if that day is tomorrow.