> My suspicion is: someone in dire need of intellectual engagement might want to work at Tesla simply because of the opportunity to exercise one's mental capacity in a challenge of equivalent magnitude. (Not Tesla specifically: I suspect any company with similarly-driven heavily-pushed technical production would suffice, for a person with the knowledge of that sphere.)
I feel like you're over selling this by a lot, especially the Hawkings and paper comparison. Someone moving from Google to Tesla because of "boredom" is likely due to the industry more than the intellectual challenge. People go to work at Tesla because they believe in Musk's "vision" of a better world.
I think you're right. Nobody lets themselves be worked into dust just so they could R&D in wider capacity.
From what I understand (comparing my knowledge of the younger brother and the younger brother's gushing over the older's intellect), the older brother was a real big head. I know people get bored when their intellectual capacity has not met a worthy rival of a problem. I extrapolated.
I could see someone moving from basic front-end/back-end engineering into more challenging roles like AI/ML, autonomous driving, etc. Chances are though if you're at the upper tier of work already it's just coming down to solving problems at the industry. Spoke with someone the other day who moved from building game engines, to helping build engines for photo/video tools. Similar technological challenges, just a totally different industry.
Do those two areas provide similar technological challenges? Obviously, they're both about coding the backbone of the product, and I understand that visuals are, often, a big part of a game engine, which could translate to visual editing. Is that what you meant?
Yep, exactly. You're shifting your knowledge and skill of computational related programming into another field just to have more of a challenge.
At my own place I've seen engineers internally transfer to take on new challenges. Not surprisingly the trend of this is front-end -> back-end/ops -> video.
I feel like you're over selling this by a lot, especially the Hawkings and paper comparison. Someone moving from Google to Tesla because of "boredom" is likely due to the industry more than the intellectual challenge. People go to work at Tesla because they believe in Musk's "vision" of a better world.