how to deal with this

In my 25-year programming career, I have worked for three Big Tech companies: Microsoft (11 years), Amazon (11 years), and Google (3.5 years). And I am very ashamed to admit it. I lived in a real bubble. At first, I did not even suspect it, simply due to my own naivety. Nowadays, I still live in “bubbles”, but at least I am aware of it and take certain actions to reduce the negative effects. Because living in a bubble is inevitable.

I don’t use the term “bubble” in the sense of the “dot-com bubble” of the late 1990s. Nor am I predicting the demise of the tech industry. Instead, I use the term “bubble” to mean “it seems to you that most people around the world live and think like you do, because most people around you live and think like you do.”

Of course, such bubbles are not limited to the world of information technology. However, in today's article I will share my experience of living in a bubble, using the example of a career as a software engineer.

The bubble of one's own exceptionalism

My first bubble burst in 1997 when I accepted a dream offer from Microsoft right out of college and moved to Seattle.

To better explain how I fell into the proverbial bubble, I have to clarify a few things. I went to high school and college in a small town in Missouri, and when I landed in Seattle, I was blown away. I had gone from a sleepy Midwestern town of about 70,000 people to a bustling, cosmopolitan city of 4 million. I still remember the evening I arrived, my eyes wide open as I stared at the skyscrapers on the way to Redmond. I had gone from a computer science class of maybe 50 people to a metropolis of 40,000 of the smartest computer scientists in the world. I was blown away. Back then, Microsoft visited the best schools and sought out the best graduates at all costs. And professors, too. Honestly, I have no idea why they chose me. I went to a decent but not the most outstanding college, and suddenly I was surrounded by guys from MIT, Stanford, CMU, Harvard, Berkeley. I was a tiny little fish in a huge pond. Taking advantage of what fate gave me, I worked for the company for 11 long years and 3 months.

This is how my first bubble was created.

Microsoft was the first and only company I knew from the inside for more than a decade. It was a microcosm of its own, and I slowly, bit by bit, became numb to everything else. I lived in Redmond, an exclusive Seattle neighborhood where the median household income was 50 percent higher than the neighborhood. Microsoft perks included a membership to a fancy gym, where I regularly watched Steve Ballmer and other Microsoft executives work out. All my friends were Microsofters: wealthy, educated, and tech-obsessed. I went from being an immigrant to the United States with a suitcase and a hundred bucks to making more money in my first year than I ever imagined. We all drove Mercedes, BMWs, Audis, Porsches. Our problems were different from everyone else’s.

Microsoft pushed the idea hard exclusivity. According to Wikipedia: “A sense of one's own uniqueness — the idea or belief that a species, country, society, institution, movement, person, or period of time is special (i.e., unusual or extraordinary)This term implies that the referent is in some way superior to other mortals.

When interviewing a candidate, we would condescendingly say things like: “Oh, he's a nice guy, but he's no good for Microsoft.” And we didn't do it because we were arrogant idiots. It's just what everyone else did, and eventually it became the norm. And we believed it. That's how the inferiority complex is born.

In the end, the propaganda in the style of “Microsoft — the only and best place in the world for software engineers” has become our credo, an indisputable fact. If you're smart, why go anywhere else?

It was the 1990s, and there was some truth to that. Microsoft was one of the world's software development centers back then, and it attracted amazing talent. Thanks to the stock options the company provided, about 12,000 employees became millionaires in the 1990s. Even I became a millionaire by the age of 25, but unfortunately only on paper and not for very long.

I'm ashamed to admit this, but I remember in 2006 a friend of mine left Microsoft for Amazon and I thought, “Poor guy, this is a step down…” (Oh, how wrong I was).

And then an amazing thing happened.

I was fired.

Microsoft, the great, the all-powerful Microsoft, was hit hard by the global financial crisis of late 2008. And I realized that I had been unceremoniously thrown out of the only world I had ever known, along with 5,000 other engineers who lost their jobs that day.

I was shocked.

I will never be able to find another job comparable to Microsoft. I will never work with as smart people. I will never make as much money…

I took a leap of faith and joined Amazon.

Once I got to Amazon, I realized that the engineers there were every bit as good as the Microsoft engineers I had the privilege of working with. The computer science and scaling problems were just as interesting. Amazon stock skyrocketed, and I ended up making twice as much money in my first year at Amazon as I did in my last year at Microsoft. By the time I left in 2020, I was making 7 times that. My career had grown exponentially.

Perhaps these arguments about Microsoft's exceptionalism were wrong?

Maybe I lived in… bubble????

At Amazon, I discovered a whole world that Microsoft had never even imagined, and I ended up spending 11 years and 3 months there, ironically and unintentionally the same amount of time I spent at Microsoft.

So what did I do to mitigate the negative effects of the exceptionalism complex?

I traveled the world. Not just the safe and comfortable First World, but backpacking through Asia, Africa, and Latin America. My passport was filled with visas for 53 countries. I met and interacted with people from all walks of life, income levels, education levels, skin colors, professions, debated with people with completely different value systems from mine, and generally perceived humanity with a newfound curiosity and humility. The world is an amazing place.

If you work in FAANG, MAMAA, or Big Tech in general, remind yourself regularly that there are smart engineers and amazing career opportunities outside your specific company. I find it amazing that I have people in my workforce who have only worked at one company their entire careers and never even had a LinkedIn profile. As my history at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google shows, there are benefits to taking long-term bets. Plus, moving from one company to another has made me a much more valuable person.

However, bubbles are tricky. They can come in a variety of sizes and shapes.

Islands within tech companies

Amazon (like Google and Microsoft and other big software companies) has a huge ecosystem of internal tools that they use in their work – from building and checking code to testing and deployment. Some of them have been exported to the external market and essentially became AWS services, some still remain within the company. Need scalable, reliable and secure storage? No problem, use AWS S3. No need to reinvent the wheel. Literally 3 lines of code. Amazon has dozens of small template building blocks that simplify the development of any service.

The problems start when you leave.

I underestimated how many of the internal skills that allowed me to be super-effective were tied to Amazon’s internal tools and idiosyncrasies as a company. As useful as that knowledge was at Amazon, it was just as useless after I left. When I moved to Google in 2020, I had to throw away a decade of experience using Amazon’s internal tools and learn Google’s equivalent tools. A lot of it came down to undocumented tribal knowledge like “don’t use tool X for this specific scenario, use tool Y,” so gaining new expertise was a long, painful, and frustrating process.

I now realize that a lot of the knowledge I worked so hard to acquire over the last 3.5 years at Google will be completely useless once I leave the company.

It's a bubble of sorts. An island, even. A tech island. All the big tech companies have one. Often, you're blissfully unaware of what's going on in the rest of the world. And sometimes, the “rest of the world” is creating something far superior to what you're producing on your island.

What steps am I taking to mitigate the negative effects of the tech island bubble?

I make sure to watch other people's conference talks, and I'm constantly reading books and blogs about how other companies work. I also frequently talk to friends who work at other companies, especially learning about how different places approach developer productivity. I spend as much time learning about how Google works as I do learning about how the rest of the world works.

Cultural bubble

This sounds like an “exceptionalism bubble,” but there are subtle differences between the two. Let me illustrate with Amazon. Amazon has a unique, almost cult-like DNA, narrowly defined by its leadership principles (LPs). These largely define the company’s culture and are used thousands of times a day when hiring, firing, and promoting people, as well as when making business decisions. Two random Amazonians, or even former Amazonians, can meet in a remote café in Tibet or Timbuktu and immediately start talking effectively to each other in the same language. When I joined Google, I immediately wanted to understand what it meant to be a Googler, so I asked ten of my colleagues to explain googliness to me. Each came up with their own interpretation. It was like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. What I eventually realized was that, as a narrowly defined culture, Amazon is a cultural bubble (while Google is a melting pot).

To be fair, I like Amazon's LPs and still use them. I find them to be an incredibly powerful framework for decision-making and human interaction. But you either fit into them (and love them and thrive in them) or you don't (and leave the company or end up in a bad place).

They were perfect for me. When I got to Amazon, I felt like I had been an Amazonian my whole life and just didn't know it. But that's not the case for everyone.

What steps have I taken to mitigate the negative impact of the cultural bubble?

Perhaps it’s a bit radical, but I left Amazon and went to Google, a culturally polar opposite. I chose to work in an environment that would challenge everything I had learned over 11 years at Amazon. By Amazon’s standards, some of Google’s processes seem deeply flawed. But they work miraculously (it is, after all, a very successful company!), challenging everything I had been taught at Amazon. For example, by the Amazon Bar Raiser’s standards, Google’s hiring process is a complete mess, yet we still hire great people. Why such a deeply flawed process produces good results is beyond me, but the facts are undeniable.

The bubble of bonuses and benefits

There are plenty of other bubbles, but this is the latest one for now. Tech companies are notorious for their crazy perks. But Microsoft was surprisingly cheap in the 1990s, and Amazon is probably one of the stingiest companies in the world, so I never encountered these “perks” until I joined Google.

Google’s perks are legendary. Free breakfast, lunch, and dinner at not one but dozens of locations, with several in the same building. You’ll never be too far from free food and drink. Don’t want to walk up or down the stairs to get your free food? Don’t worry, there’s a “micro kitchen” on every floor with snacks and drinks. Feeling energized by your free meal? You can visit the free gym with top-notch exercise machines. Want to unwind? Book a free session with a friendly massage therapist. Feeling sleepy after your free massage? Take a nap in a comfy sleep pod. Want to get some fresh air on a nice sunny day? Grab a free kayak or paddleboard and paddle around South Lake Union or Seattle’s Fremont Cut. Need to travel to Bangalore for business? Just book yourself into a suite on Qatar Airways (Amazon has always offered economy only!). The list goes on and on. For someone who spent 22.5 years working for tight-fisted companies, the move to Google was extremely funny.

How easy it is for us to take things for granted. I realized I was trapped in a “privilege bubble” when I found myself whining to a coworker because I had to walk down a flight of stairs to get my free morning coconut water. Yes, I was used to coming to work every morning and starting my day with a refreshing chilled coconut water, sipping it while catching up on my emails. To my dismay, the micro kitchen on my floor was out of coconut water that day, and I had to make the enormous and humiliating effort of walking down the stairs and getting some coconut water from the micro kitchen next door.

These benefits are fantastic. But they can easily trap you in a sense of self-importance. No, companies are not obligated to give you free coconut water. This is a business. You are there to do your job, not to be pampered. I find “a day in the life (of a Googler or another company representative with great benefits)” videos unacceptable. They are too superficial. But even my recruiters emphasized the benefits when they tried to convince me to join Google. Don't choose a company because it gives you free food. Choose a company for the career growth that will come from working hard and making bold decisions every now and then.

Finally

At this point in my life, I have encountered so many bubbles that I can at least spot them early and think carefully about how to mitigate the negative effects of being in them. Social media algorithms decide what information to show you, retailers decide what products to recommend to you. Bubbles are everywhere, and there is no point in running from them. However, if you go through life with your eyes wide open, you will know how to cope with them.