It’s Not What You Do, It’s Who You Do It For

Dr Stuart Woolley
CodeX
Published in
6 min readJan 22, 2024

--

The curse of the “Big Tech Choice” in the software engineering industry.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

We’ve all been there, trying to weigh up the potential benefits of jumping through the hideously long and tortuous recruitment charade of technical tests, psychometric exercises, culture fit screenings, and bar raiser interviews to score a job with one of the “Big Tech” companies.

There’s a whole industry around this kind of thing now with everything from rote memorisation of specific problem solutions to pretending to be a normal person who’s “super excited” at anything interviewers mentioned in an interview to such an extent that you won’t move a needle on a lie detector test.

Thing is, that bubble burst a while back.

The “ex-Amazon / ex-Meta / ex-Google” textual embellishments on LinkedIn profiles do little to excite the rest of the industry other than making most of us wonder why you left if it was so prestigious, whether you really did understand all of the Leetcode problems that you most likely were forced to regurgitate at interview, and most of all whether we could stand the hubris in our company of someone who puts that kind of thing in their profile header when it’s already clear in your experience section.

The majority of people I’ve met who’ve survived experiences with the tumultuous…

--

--

CodeX
CodeX

Published in CodeX

Everything connected with Tech & Code. Follow to join our 1M+ monthly readers

Dr Stuart Woolley
Dr Stuart Woolley

Written by Dr Stuart Woolley

Worries about the future. Way too involved with software. Likes coffee, maths, and . Would prefer to be in academia. SpaceX, X, and Overwatch fan.

Responses (3)

What are your thoughts?