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>'I like coding and interesting problems'

From what I understand, after all the hullabaloos in interviewing, most programmers at these companies are assigned menial, boring maintenance code tasks all day.

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Google has a ton of interesting work, but the worst engineers at Google don't get to do it and you are unlikely to get such a position as a new grad. But as long as you do good work you can easily switch to an interesting team after a year. And since the first year as a new grad you mostly learn the ropes how to design services, write tests, write readable code, deploy to production etc, so most things are interesting anyway.

This is not entirely true. Google doesn’t have enough interesting work for even its “better” engineers. Amount of hoops you have to jump to do any good work is enormous and it takes toll unless you’re in a really good org. It’s a good place to work but you’ll be lot less starry-eyed about Google once you cross your L5 promotion.

Also it’s entirely possible to land in a good team as a new-grad. Be a little picky during team selection.

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