Why I WON'T Return to BIG TECH Job (xGoogle xAmazon Engineer)

Been there done that, and one thing has always bothered me working in the big tech.
I share my experience with you to provide some insight for those who are curious!


Background Music

Fall Asleep by Tokyo Music Walker
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

[wahswolf]

I am in a very small tech company for over 27 years now. Would not trade that experience for anything. There are many small tech companies doing really innovative stuff that flies under the radar, and they do it so well their employees are rewarded bigly.

[chrishuggins]

I worked for a few big tech companies through the years and when I tell you burnout is real! It was constant mundane tasks that really just took the joy out of the job. I would dread coming into work somedays. About 6 months ago I moved to a small town and took a government job with the local IT department. This job has been a dream. Interesting projects, easier workload to manage and none of the office politics. I'm making 1/3 less than I previously was making but I come home with much more energy. I'll probably never go back to big tech at this point. Not worth it.

[XinFloridaLife]

i worked in silicon valley for 15 years at startups and big companies as an engineer. I am retired from engineering now. small companies can be worse without a review process so you just have to be in the in crowd. big company bullshit is always the same everywhere regardless of your role. so glad i am just jobless now. you should always care about your own health and family more

[renatolins]

Man.. as a perfectionist front-end dev, I can say it was almost impossible to take the right amount of time to do the right thing. Every good job I did was punished, in one way or another.. either by jealousy, greed, arrogance, etc, people will find a way to stand against the ones with potential and passion to do what is right.. (as per my 10+ yrs of xp)

[JulioReguero]

Precisely the story of my corporate life: caring too much about the project, the product, the outcome, the details, the quality. All of it for nothing other than a large collection of disappointments, headaches, frustrations, lack of motivation, careless attitude, mediocrity, waste of my precious time, toxic environments polluting my mind and my soul, backstabbing, unfairnesses, cruelty, and the list goes on and on.

[Bettylulseged]

Started at Apple then went to Microsoft. I got laid off from Microsoft recently. Not sure I am ready to leave the industry yet though. Still pretty early in my career. I do agree that working in this industry has been glamorized but it is a lot of work that people do not talk about. Very draining.

[youssefhossam]

Man, this is spot on. I’m a swe at Google and I’m in a constant struggle with “not not caring”. I love how you ended your video as it’s pretty much the same conclusion I’ve reached a couple of months ago. Big tech isn’t for me and this will probably be my last big tech job.

[justaturtlefella]

The key word in big tech is business impact. I work at a FAANG, and my annual performance review came back very positive and largely focused on a single task I worked on for 1 week, which while not trivial was largely a maintenance operation to update some dependencies, it was far from the most technically complex thing I worked on in 2022, but it saved the company a lot of money in operating expenses, and I got to take the credit.

[jonbanks]

You have just described the life of a military officer. I went into the army with high expectations only to discover exactly what you described.

[Tech.Unicorn]

Totally agree! Ex-Google here & I expected to solve super cool problems & the reality was more like being given the most mundane annoying tasks… still loved working there but more interesting problems are found at startups iimo

[sharoncohen]

When I interviewed at Google, I asked every interviewer what their team works on and they always answered with some vague unenthusiastic response.
One guy told me that his team discovered a team working on an identical project for 3 months, and they then had to try to split up the work.

[BonBonShrimp]

In my career of over 15 years, I had always worked at the big tech companies (in the semiconductor industry though). It got very boring at one point after so many years (this is even more true for hardware design which is a very specialized job). So then I took a break and joined a much smaller company with <150 people (and which is not a big tech type company, but in the finance industry). While the work is more interesting in some ways, it's a disorganized mess with no real planning, just one guy (my boss) taking all the important decisions (in many cases which were proving wrong). I thought that being a much smaller company, they would be more flexible and asked if I could do something a bit different (after having spent a year there), and they outright denied. Not to mention, salary was way lower than my previous jobs at big tech companies. I accepted the lower salary because I was really excited to work in a different environment and do something new, and thought it would give me more opportunities to try out some new stuff, but in the end, it didn't work out that way. So I'm not very sure it was really worth it. At least when you work for a big company, usually the salary is good and there's the prestige that comes with the name. Either way, at the end of the day, it's just a job, and finding the perfect (or even near perfect) job is not the norm, rather the exception.

[JohnSnow-nyio]

Having the dream of working for these companies signals a problem... What matters in life is our relationship to others (family, friends, partners), not having a job at a meme company. One of the results of our toxic culture

[glebbondarenko]

Still working in Amazon. Totally agree, it's killing my satisfaction of my work :(

[lifeofcode]

This is why I been really enjoying the start up space, where you can bring passion to a project, and small knit teams accomplish amazing goals. Then are rewarded for it. Being lead engineer at a small company makes you feel so much more appreciated and valuable than being just another number employee in big tech.

[WisomofHal]

Been in tech for 5 years now. 2 years at a medium sized company. I purchased a house 5 years ago and I have seen beautiful equity gains. I have about a year left and I’ll cash in all my RSU. I’m originally from Ohio and grew up in the sticks. I plan to sell my home, take my stock and home equity and high tail it to an LCOL area, purchase about 10-15 acres, put a large down payment, and start a small family livestock business. I could surely keep grinding to make more money, but lately I’ve been killing myself with questions about what I want to do versus what I have to do. I think I was disciplined and diligent enough these past years to make my gains in order to go do what I want. To some it may not sound as sexy as being a software engineer at FAANG, but it sounds like the sexiest thing to me.

[Waruto]

I have similar experience working at a big tech company. I'm also planning on leaving and maybe never coming back until I am ready to chill at a big tech company. For now, I am seeking out mid-sized companies that have interesting work and still pays just as much if not more than big tech companies. The impression I got from interviewing at mid-sized company was there were more employees who were genuinely trying to build a good product and the interview bar was higher. There was also more focus in building a project together than data structures & algorithms in the interviews.

[dlewis]

I work in IT project administration for government clients. I never worked at a tech company but this all seems like how I figured it would be to work for one. When I was a young techie I used to get excited about tech. As the years went by I got disillusioned but I am just happy to be in an industry with solid six figure incomes.

[kevinsantana]

About to complete my first year in big tech and the experience seems to be in line with what your mentioning. Product success and even good product engineering seem to fall at the way side in favor of superficial metrics.

[garthf]

Interesting video, the corporate culture you describe is certainly not restricted just to the tech industry/. Many people choose though to stick with it because of the opportunities, remuneration and benefits. I think though you are an entrepreneur at heart and you should follow your heart.