TL;DR: Pros: a lot of money and a great CV line. Cons: professional rot and a mental health hazard.

The Big Tech Job as a Tradeoff

Overall, I spent about 3 years in semi-Big-Tech and Big-Tech, which were not very pleasurable; at least a part of that were bad choices I made. In hindsight I should have reached out for more experienced people’s opinions to adjust my expectations before I joined. While I cannot fix my own past misconceptions, I can assist my main intended audience - professionals who are making or considering their own first steps in Big Tech - whom I hope to provide with some priming on what to expect.

While the sordid specifics of what happened to me may be of interest for a later post, I actually wanted to make one that’s entirely devoted to the “big picture”.

Points for Big Tech Jobs

Money; lots of it

Big Tech jobs pay up superbly. All of the companies in question have troves of cash, and as a matter of prestige, they offer the best salaries on the market, and if there’s a contested candidate - they actually wage a bidding war. A corollary is - if you want to go into the Big Tech job market, do yourself a favor and LeetCode your way far enough to get several offers at once; this will make the compensation cog wheels spin your way.

Right now Big Tech is one of the only options for a reasonably capable person not born into wealth to become able to afford living in many of the localities that promise a good level of education for children. In addition to that, current salary levels are high enough to allow some people to effectively retire in their 40s or 50s, and start a second career without a major risk of suddenly facing poverty in old age.

The above is especially salient when considering that the other trades that allow that – most importantly, law and medicine – mean having worse work-life-balance than in tech and working essentially until the death of either the body or the mind – whatever comes first.

Great career boost

Working at Big Tech is today what used to be going to a great school a generation ago – a signal/marker of being capable enough to be considered universally fit for a wide variety of purposes.

Even a year or two of experience in Big Tech allows you to “learn the lingo”. For a huge number of things you could want to do after Big Tech, having a Big Tech line in your CV would open doors, whether those doors are of more boutique technology operators, of venture capital firms or even of governments. As a bonus factor, alumni networks are real and are fantastic assets for career growth, whether in or out of Big Tech.

Points against Big Tech jobs

Hyper-specialization

A lot of Big Tech is about running products and lines business that are years to decades old. This practically means the price of mistakes is extremely high, and this breeds a culture that’s technologically risk-averse; indeed, I consider many leaders in the field to be simply incapable of enacting deep technological change.

Although Big Tech likes to brag about super advanced technology, the truth is that most employees are doing mostly “meh” engineering. There are two core reasons for that:

Most work is application work in any case. Building applications requires excelling at a single set of ideas and APIs, and beyond the low-hanging fruit, investing into a specific set of repetative menial tasks (e.g.: passing some parameter through 5 API layers). People who focus on that have less energy to learn new approaches and technologies, which in turn stalls their careers.
Business continuity discourages dramatic changes in the code base. Indeed, the typical case is that most code is maintained incrementally. When changes happen, they are often made by fairly inexperienced people who are under a lot of stress to demonstrate achievements in their periodic reviews. This pattern causes very bad code quality, which causes new employees spends most of their time fighting the consequences of other people’s bad choices, instead of learning how to make good choices of their own.

From the employee growth perspective, while learning how to “play it safe” is an important mindset, it is only a small part of what it takes to level up aspiring professionals; and for those of us who have been blessed with a passion for engineering, overindulging in such work definitely quenches this passion.

Impacted well-being

Big Tech employs a lot of people who already have a decent salary. This is a great recipe for projects not getting anywhere, especially because big organizations often have a major gap in communications between people who can assess business value and the people who can figure out the engineering required for that value.

Accordingly, the recipe that most organizations converged to is – to feed the pool with motivated people (often fresh out of school) and establish a brutal and relentless review regime to keep them moving.

From the employees’ perspective the above is just the right recipe to descend into a spiral of burn-out, depression and anxiety. The employer then throws in a bone of covering the costs of a gym membership and perhaps of a moderately priced therapist; while I find this commendable, I’d much rather prefer not having to be depressed in the first place.

For many of us, having major professional challenges could offset those bad feelings; however the hyper-specialization I mentioned above shunts self-realization. There’s literally nothing very cool to be done, and for me personally, the miniscule bump in some business metric - which is what my highly specialized labor could bring about - would not justify missing out on my family time.

The Synthesis

No need to be a Genius

My main message here: Big Tech Jobs mainly require the people holding them to be aggressive micro-optimizers of business performance, which requires much more perseverence than engineering prowess. Appropriately, the Big Tech recruitment pipeline actually selects people by being able to invest several months into memorizing the solutions for LeetCode challenges and to deliver them smoothly – which is, in a way, surprisingly representative of the attitude required to keep that job after winning it.

Just a job

A lot of people in Big Tech can testify that their jobs caused an adverse impact to their well-being, first and foremost through anxiety and depression.

Especially for people who are like 2 or 3 years into Big Tech, if that’s where you’re at – get out. You already unlocked like 80% of the CV potential, and you are literally one interview round away from jobs that are much much better for your well-being - likely outside of Big Tech.

Specific Circumstances Matter

The above narrative is a generalization that applies to most of the careers most of the time.

One type of cases in which it does not hold are for people who are already highly specialized, and are brought in into an expert slot - such slots typically have a very distinct professional profile and can be seen in the context of a conventional narrow expertise growth path.

Further counterexamples exist and are not uncommon, and the reader is cautioned to perform due dilligence over propositions appearing too good to be true. Bellow is one common trap:

Beware of ðe old switcheroo

From time to time I hear about teams that are Entirely Not Like That, often through getting approval for non-standard recruiting/applicant filtering practices. Joining such a team sounds like a great way to get the pros, without a lot of the cons! But –

It is actually a trap. If the team’s so great, it means that everybody is trying to join it, which means very few applications do, which means that deliberately or not, it’s actually a bait to be switched. The applicant completes the interview round and then is told “we have enough internal candidates for Team Cool, but do join for Team Legacy, and you’ll become eligible for Team Cool in 3 years”. Then in 3 years, you will have burnt out, or Team Cool will have become too cool for anyone with just 3 years of tenure, or maybe you will have gotten what you want at the price of 3 very uninspiring years, which is probably more than Team Cool was worth in any case.

The above having been taken into account – if you need the boost, give it a try!

Big Tech jobs are definitely great for your wallet, and they might be just the pivot your career needs to start going in the direction you really are craving for. Accordingly, as long as you are mindful of the above, I do want to encourage you to spend these few months on LeetCode and to apply - and may the periodic reviews be ever in your favor!