Against big tech credentialism

Ryan Peterman is a YouTube interviewer who speaks with senior employees at big tech companies. On the one hand, it is incredible how accessible high-income professionals at highly competitive organizations are, and how open they are willing to speak about their work. But there is some danger in presuming that there is wisdom to be gleaned from them.

When I reflect on my (currently on pause) ten year career in the tech industry, it's not clear what aspects of my career progression were a result of luck and which were a result of my abilities. The subjects of Ryan's interviews generally don't seem to have this reservation, and speak with authority based on their titles. If you explore tech YouTube, you'll find various content creators brandishing their "ex-(big company)" title as a symbol of status or expertise. It is common for engineers to be referred to by their "years of experience."

I am highly critical of this culture. Early-career engineers may aspire to achieve a high-paying role like this, but they should not make the mistake of thinking that a title or number of years in the field confers expertise.

In Zen Buddhism, there exists the concept of "beginner's mind," the idea that even the most-experienced practitioners should approach Zen with a state of total, naive humility — that if one thinks that they have "achieved" something through practice, they have been led astray, and misunderstand Zen. One of my favorite aspects of my career was learning not from those more senior than me, but those more junior to me, who often brought a fresh perspective to an organization and to my work. There is a danger of becoming too confident in one's abilities, too resistant to change.

I learned from experience that extremely senior people with a lot of power and very fancy big tech titles can still get things very, very wrong. A big title does not insulate one from making mistakes, and it is dangerous to structure an organization in such a rigidly hierarchical way, giving people an inflated belief in their abilities, and discouraging them from admitting their faults or limitations.

It's also important to understand that big tech companies are a very specific form of human organization. Over-indexing on understanding their dynamics can narrow engineers' focuses, producing a kind of "company man", comfortable with the dynamics of big tech, but actually quite poor at the work itself. This is a danger I was wary of myself — I noticed that as I became more senior, my responsibilities became more focused on the bureaucracy of the organization, I spent less time doing engineering work and more time in meetings, "coordinating with stakeholders," writing documents of questionable value. It's easy to be susceptible to the false belief that because highly profitable companies do things a certain way, that way must be good, or the reason behind it must be valid. Often, a great engineer at a big tech company is one who succeeds in spite of the company's immense organizational dysfunction.

If I were to (with the caveat of the humility I advocate for) give advice to young engineers, it would be to focus primarily on the durable skill that matters in the tech industry: excellent engineering ability. Think critically about how systems are designed, do not accept the word of "expert" or "senior" engineers merely based on their titles. And more broadly, instead of spending your time listening to big tech engineers, study the humanities: read literature, appreciate art, and learn from excellent people outside your field of expertise. If you do want to consult engineering experts, hear out folks who are outside the system of big tech, who explore bizarre and unconventional ideas in software, or older engineers from a different era, before a lot of bad ideas became ubiquitous. There is far more to be learned from these people than from the average senior+ engineer at a contemporary Apple, Google, etc.

But most importantly, be kind, because none of this tech stuff really matters anyway.