The Secret Value Of Big Tech

The real benefit of working at large tech companies.

Working in big tech can make a big difference in your career — especially early on. While there are many commonly discussed benefits of working in big tech like large salaries, good work-life balance, incredible perks and more, this article will focus on one lesser-known value that big tech provides.

In short, that value is “answers”. For much of my early career, I felt I had little to no guidance around the “correct” way to develop software. Most startups I had worked at lived by one requirement: make it work. And if it worked, it was done — no tests, no software patterns, and no regard for scale or long-term maintainability.

It was largely akin to the Wild West. We made up the rules as we went and practiced what I’ll call “shoot from the hip” development. And while we could argue for an eternity whether or not these startups made the right choices what was clear is that it wasn’t right for me. What I wanted more than anything early in my career was to be guided and gather a wealth of knowledge on how to develop software.

Instead, I simply developed software. Little thought was given to how something could be developed and instead, we focused on how fast development could be done. Instead of design docs, we had design talks — whoever talks more cares more and therefore their solution is best. While creating features and writing lots of code was fun, it was hard to believe that I was developing valuable long-term knowledge within my field.

Because of this, I constantly looked for change. In the first three years of my career, I had three separate jobs. With each change, I made it my goal to work at bigger and bigger companies figuring larger companies have more engineers and therefore stronger mentorship and more strictly defined processes around development. Largely, I was right. With each job change, I worked with more engineers, received stronger mentorship opportunities, and learned more development processes that are grounded in verifiable information.

Moving from startups and being one of just five engineers to now having worked at some of the largest tech companies in the world, I truly find this to be the value of working in big tech. When you have questions there are real answers you’ll receive and tradeoffs you’ll come to know. Furthermore, each answer you’re given is often backed by an article, documentation, anecdotes, or numeric data detailing why particular decisions have been made and are preferred.

It’s hard to distil just how advantageous an environment like this is, but this quote comes close:

"No one of us is as smart as all of us."

Being surrounded by engineers who are so knowledgeable and have many times the amount of experience as myself allows me to be a sponge. Early in your career, this is invaluable and can expedite your learning. Working at large companies early helps you learn the “ABCs” of software development. While it’s possible to do this at smaller companies I’d argue that the quality of this learning scales with company size. Don’t believe me? Fine, most things in software engineering boil down to “it depends” anyway.

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