Member-only story
It’s Not What You Do, It’s Who You Do It For
The curse of the “Big Tech Choice” in the software engineering industry.
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 interview process of certain companies, and have spent time within their collective sweat shop operations divide into three distinct groups.
There are those that stick around and stay. They are the intellectually capable who didn’t have to rote learn and do have a natural gift for the Grand Game, they’re curious and like to solve the big problems but are also able to put up with being a part of a big corporate machine somewhat akin to serving in the armed forces — i.e. it’s a great job and rewarding job for life… if you can put up with the continual bullshit and take orders unquestionably from your superiors.
There are those that want the glory, to bask in the halo effect, that hop between the big names and go on to litter their online profiles with flair. Of course, they leave quite quickly to go to another big name before finally upping sticks when they either can’t find any more big names (word gets around) or just can’t really cut…
