Google

Any alien technology, sufficiently advanced, will appear to be magic.

Compared to what anyone else is doing, what Google has built in its worldwide serving infrastructure is magic.

No one, not even Defense, has the compute power on the scale that Google has.

If you can manage to live up to the challenge, you are in the very top echelon of engineering talent in the world.

There is also a culture of rewarding and supporting us engineers in building and maintaining that infrastructure.

Massive pressure to perform to the level of your peers, to the level of legendary figures who have gone before, and to the levels required to keep the dollar generating machinery running.

Also, management, communication, and other people skills are not favored in engineering. The results are predictable enough that technically competent engineers who demonstrate good results get management responsibilities that they fit in between technical work. Those that have the people skills don't get these promotions.

I have not personally suffered from this, so this analysis is not sour grapes. I have seen women who are already doing the project management role out of necessity, as well as their own technical load, get passed over for promotion even though the projects they are on succeed, because they can't point to high personal metrics due to their unrecognized management load.

Lift the lid on the pressure cooker.

Allow people to work to their strengths and move to different areas to do so.

In areas where it's hard to hire good engineers, like Site Reliability, once you're in, carrying a pager, you're the backbone of the company and no one wants to let you go and do project-based stuff.

When things are going well, you get bonuses, but if you screw up, you're losing thousands a minute and the pressure is horrible.