hello everybody and welcome to the Alex the analyst show thank you guys so much for watching today we are going to be talking all about why I think big Tech is overrated now this is a personal opinion this is what I personally believe not everybody is going to agree with me and in fact I know they're going to be comments down below being like Alex you never even worked in big Tech why do you think big Tech is overrated you have no right to be saying that and that's fine I actually encourage that and if
you have a kind of opposite opinion of me I want you to let me know because you know what I can admit that I can be wrong now if you have not joined one of these Alex the analyst shows before this is my long form episodes where I just talk about things um you come in you hang out and that's it it's just super simple and so this isn't one of my short 8 to 10 minute videos this is my long one so I can go 30 minutes an hour hour and a half as long
as it needs to go it will go but it's pretty simple in the fact that I just talk I have no background music I don't do anything so just plug it in or listen to it while you're driving or while you're working at or whatever it is uh and that's kind of how we do things around here now uh I have a lot to get to I have a ton of different points over here and I'm going to talk to a lot of them and as I'm going through I'll share just some of my experience
as I've kind of got into Tech uh just in an unnatural way or not an unnatural but an unusual way because I started out working at a small Healthcare analytics company I then got into a Fortune 500 company where I worked up through the ranks I then started YouTube channel which you know if you're watching this this is my YouTube channel and then through that I started an edtech company called analyst Builder and I also started Consulting on the side about two and a half years ago that Consulting has led me to work with some
of these big tech companies that we're going to be talking about today and I'm not going to go into Super specifics on every single you know tech company I'm just kind of talking about tech companies in general I'm talking Amazon Apple Tesla um Twitter meta all of these different companies I would consider tech companies and so well I wouldn't consider them they are tech companies and so over the past few years I've consulted with a lot of these companies I've gotten to know a lot of the employees at these companies I've had friends who have
worked at these companies I've also had a lot of people who have wanted me to come in for interviews at these companies and so I'll share a lot of these experiences as we go and how my viewpoint has really changed over the years so I'm going to start back I'm not actually going to jump into this I'm going to start back really quickly on just briefly my journey so when I got that Healthcare analytics company my main goal I was like man I really want to work at Amazon that was like my goal I would
love to work at Amazon as a data analyst I was like if I could get there that was the Pinnacle of success for me but I knew it would take a while because uh I knew that I didn't have the experience I had no relevant experience I could get me to that you know Pinnacle of success in my mind now this is back in 2017 so back in 2017 I was just you know fresh out of college and I was ready to get working and so I started working at The Fortune 500 company I was
like okay this is huge because this is kind of the next step to getting bigger experience kind of at a name brand company which will then really help me get into big Tech and so as I started working at this Fortune 500 company which was aurus Bergen at the time they recently changed their name to something like conera or something like that I don't know um but as I started working there I started realizing in a lot of different things one a lot of the people who were working there were previous Tech employees so we
had a lot of people who used to work at you know either was Toyota which isn't technically a tech company but in their Tech uh division some larger companies uh who used to work at Facebook who used to work at you know Twitter or all these places but now they were coming in to work on a lot of our data infrastructure and stuff like that and so it was pretty neat I got to talk with them and get to know them quite a bit um and actually find out why they didn't work there anymore and
so it was through this time at the Fortune 500 company where I was like I don't know if I really want to anymore you know it seems like a lot of work not as big of pay off as I was thinking and then especially after I quit my job full-time started doing consulting full-time and started working directly with people who are working there and at and with these companies I absolutely was like I'm not even going to try I don't want to work at this company and then of course you know let's say in early
2024 I've had some of these companies reach out or you know I've had people who work at these companies reach out saying hey we have an opening I really like your YouTube channel I would love for you to come and work with me uh that'd be awesome and so I've had these experiences where now I could have if I wanted to I absolutely could have worked to these companies but I've always turned them down and so that's a little bit of background for kind of where I'm coming from it's not just I'm a hater I
hate big tech companies I just think for a lot of people it's not really worth it anymore and there are a lot of downsides I think the downsides are starting to even outweigh the kind of pros and the pros are the biggest one uh is money you're going to make more money in these technical jobs but also the other biggest thing is that you have a name brand on your resume and people want to say hey I work for that app or that company that you like or that you use and so there is this
kind of recognition uh that you get with working at these companies so let me jump into it with all that background information and give me a second I'm going to take a sip of water really quick with all this background information um the first and probably one of the biggest downsides right now and just so you know I'm recording this at the very end of 20124 might release it a 2025 uh but the biggest one right now is Tech layoffs this is not unique to just big Tech in general but it's is kind of bigger
news in big Tech because when people hear that Amazon let go of 50,000 employees that's a big deal and the reason why it's such a big deal is cuz it's it's just one company now this is happening across the board especially in the United States a lot of people are losing their jobs but it's at smaller companies and so smaller companies let go of 20% of their company you know that's not going to be big breaking national news if Amazon lets go of 20% of their employees that's going to be insane news because they have
millions of employees now it wasn't 20% but you get the picture and so a lot of these big tech companies have been in the headlines saying hey we're letting go of let's say 5% of our staff 10% of our staff and that's a really big kind of scary thing to think about excuse me and so job security is not there anymore in these big tech companies from around 2010 and onward up until maybe like 2020 job security was really good at these big tech companies in fact once you got in you stayed for a long
time where you kind of bounced around different tech companies but you stayed in that Tech world because there was so many jobs available was growing so fast hiring in big Tech was like you could even get jobs just as Recruiters in big Tech and make a massive amount of money and so all of these factors during that time period made it just such a great place to want to get into because you're going to make a lot of money you're going to be working at a name brand company and you're going to have so many
perks and benefits I mean talking free meals you get subsidies for your apartment or your living you may even live on campus at some of these big companies so there were a lot of benefits to working at these companies now right when Co hit or after Co hit people started working remote a lot of these companies started sending people home and a lot of those benefits went away and then we started seeing layoffs and so right around 2021 into 2023 even into 2024 which we're in now we've seen kind of this rise in people getting
laid off it's not a good thing uh obviously but the job security that once was is no longer there so once you get that job you could be let go in the first six months you could be let go in the first year you may not have a job the same year that you were hired and that's really scary for a lot of people and I myself I have a family feed I got three kids I got a wife I can't be worrying about getting laid off in fact that is why I left one of
my previous jobs uh it was that small Healthcare analytics company I actually loved that job I wanted to stay there longterm and they actually had a plan for me to you know get promoted and stay in that company but they started missing paychecks and I got worried that I wasn't going to be able to you know have a job to feed my family that's very worrisome now you know it depends on where you are in life at what stage of life you're in if you're right out of college you know you don't it's okay if
you get laid off you can go back and you can live with your parents you can go and bunk with a roommate who still has a job you know stay in their apartment whatever it is but for someone like me I'm the bread winner of my family I can't kind of risk that and so you can't be as uh at least at my age or you know where I am in life I can't have that level of risk for these types of jobs and that's a lot of people out there a lot of people want
families they want to get married they want to you know have kids and that is not a uh a good thing when you're working at these companies you have a lot of lack of job security uh the next thing is Corporate B bureaucracy now I put this there um because as I've kind of progressed in my career I found myself really despising Management in a certain level management just gets in its own way and it is not fun um I was a analytics manager for about a year and I got out of it quick I
was like I hate this this sucks um and big tech companies have an immense amount of bureaucracy when it comes to so many different things and so these kind of smaller companies you get it on a small scale you know you have this manager who wants to do this you have this person who wants to do this but at a big tech company it gets Amplified times 10 because there's a lot of public opinion there are um you know people who have their own self-interest put above every other interest and so you have to play
all this politics and there's so many so much red tape and there's so many issues with this now that was uh you know my just personal take but I've talked to a lot of people who were managers directors um at these big companies who are making like you know mid six figures I'm talking four five $600,000 and they were just killing it and a lot of them left because of you know this bureaucracy or this red tape or this you know whatever you want to call it it just made it miserable it makes it absolutely
miserable to be a part of now some people kind of thrive on that some people really like the politics of it um I just personally don't and so you know that's become even more prevalent as we started seeing uh you know people starting work from home and all these things sorry my camera just randomly turned off I had to fix that but um I think that's something that not a lot of people think about once they get into big Tech you know once they get into big Tech they're absolutely they see it every day but
they don't think about it before they get into big Tech and so you know this red tape all this stuff you're going to get that the politics you'll get that at every company on some level it's just Amplified immensely when you're working can't these big tech companies so I think that's something that I know I personally don't like I hate it I don't want to be a part of it and I know that's the same for a lot of different people all right the next thing is uh let's see work life balance now uh everybody
knew that work life balance in big Tech was bad right it was like 60h hour weeks uh you don't spend a lot of time with your family yada y but you were making an immense amount of money and you had good job security and so so a lot of people were like they were okay with that lack of work life balance because they knew that the tradeoff down the road was going to be worth it you know or the immediate right they're going to have a a really well-paying job but today that's not really the
case you're still required to work a lot of hours um whether you're remote or not but there isn't that knowledge that you were definitely going to have a job down the road you're going to have a job in a year or two so people are starting to and this has you know been from other people I've talked to people are starting to realize they're like wait a second why should I be working 60 70 hours a week which is insane right 60 or 70 hours a week for this company that may just lay me off
like it doesn't matter in 6 months you know why would I put in that work and so a lot of people aren't seeing that tradeoff anymore it's you know they're still a name brand there's still good money in big Tech but they're like you know I have responsibilities in my life I can't just work 67 hours a week and not have anything pay from that not have any big thing to show um that's just a small one I'm not touching on that one too much all right here's the next one and this is what I
think is kind of another one that I personally really resonate with um I really like making a difference I like making an impact I like my work to mean something in big Tech um and this is just from a lot of you know firsthand accounts that I've listened to they were like you know I was working on a third page you know design of a settings page that no one will ever see or I was working on like a you know for example like a data analyst data scientist I was working on some analysis for
some secondary team of of this comp this I was working on some secondary team for this Branch to do some analysis and build some dashboards that I knew no one would ever see or use in any way it just feels very um very sad like you're working really hard on something that you know no one's going to use no one cares about it's just work um and you know when you were coming up in the 2010s and the you know up to 2020 the work was kind of meaningful it was building something and you were
doing something but now a lot of these companies have scaled to a point where there's not as much meaning ful work to be done anymore now there's still work to be done I'm not saying that's not true but you're not making a huge impact anymore um unless you were designing the next big thing in that company which is you know maybe several hundred people out of the tens of thousands you're maintaining you're maintaining some data you're you're building out uh or maintaining something that was already built out it's not super important and a lot of
people kind of resonate with that they're like I don't want to work on something that means absolutely nothing I want to work on something that means something that's why a lot of really intelligent tech people will gravitate towards startups because you're building something you're owning it and it's meaningful and that's kind of how these large tech companies today used to be they used to be these small startups and then they started scaling then they scaled even too high and now we're seeing these layoffs and so the impact of work isn't really there anymore it's not
as important you're really you know working on most likely I mean there are going to be some people are doing some meaningful work but for most people working at these companies they're not doing something that's super useful and meaningful when I worked at a small Healthcare analytics company with like 50 employees the work that I was doing was 100% meaningful everything that I did was you know working with a customer working with a client or working with my boss everything was meaningful and so the smaller the company the more meaningful your work is going to
be and these big tech companies have just scaled to almost a overly large size I don't know how it best best to say that but you know what I mean it's like do you really need 300,000 people to run this company do you need a thousand data analysts to analyze this data probably not and so you know the work that you're doing may not be meaningful in any way and that makes me really sad um I found that when I became a manager and this is kind of what I didn't like about being a manager
is the work that I did was not as important um I was managing people who were doing good work who were making were making a difference but I myself didn't feel like I was making a big impact like if I felt like I if I left tomorrow my team would have been able to do really anything they were going to do they could still get all the work done um and you know I felt like I was doing good stuff every so often you know I was helping drive us to kind of a more uh
a less silent approach we were getting everything uh together in Azure and I was hiring people and you know some of it was meaningful absolutely but I hated feeling like you know half of what I was doing is just busy work it wasn't useful I like to have impact and so what I when I started Consulting I could directly see I'm like I would give them this advice or I would help them implement this or I would help them you know vet these different softwares when I was doing that it was having an immediate impact
and I loved that I found that to be really purposeful and so as I've talked to all these different people who have worked at these companies most of them not all of them but most of them are like yeah my work wasn't that important you know I did this and I did this and I did this but it wasn't like super impactful and it just didn't make sense to me so that's one thing that I personally think is really overrated in the tech World everyone thinks they're going to jump in and work on the next
big thing typically you're working on this like team that does some random thing that you've never heard of you just got into that company and so you're like I'm willing to work on it but you're not going to make any big impact and I hate to say that like that but it's kind of true all right let me look at my notes real quick um yeah so uh this kind of goes back to or kind of goes to um what we were just talking about so this is the desire to work on smaller more diverse
product projects as well as uh limited availability to do different types of work when you get when you're working at a small company uh you work on everything you work on you know data collection you work on data transformation you work on data pipelines uh you work on the uh data visualization and then working with clients and stakeholders you have your hands on a lot of different things so you wear a lot of different hats when you work at a big company typically you're working in you know a very specific and very Niche role and
sometimes that's okay uh in fact you know back when I was a Fortune 500 company as a data analyst I was on the data collection team that's what we did it was under our data science umbrella we were data collection that's was kind of like my specialty and I learned an immense amount about data collection and it was amazing and I loved every second of it like ETL processes and even data engineering and stuff like that I have a very big fondness towards but I didn't work at data visualization at all and I did in
my previous role but I didn't get to work on it at all in that role U maybe a little in powerbi um but I also didn't work a ton on different types of analysis that I would have liked to do I didn't get to work with different tools that I would have liked to do so there are pros and cons to this one specifically um the pros are is that you can really Niche down and become an expert in this area the con of it is is you don't get to work on with a lot
of different tools and you don't get to work on a lot of different areas and this only becomes even more so when you're working at Big tech companies um I have talked to so many people who've worked at Instagram specifically and they're like at Instagram you know there's only so much you can do and when you have thousands tens of thousands of employees um you know you get really Niche down into one specific thing this is the only thing you work on and to me that just sounds miserable that just sounds horrible I think most
people who work want to do different things they want to get be creative and they want their work to be valued and they want to try out new tech stocks and they want to do different things um and big Tech you don't really get to do that you don't uh in fact one of my old buddies he worked at Amazon for like three years and he said in those three years he worked with the exact same Tech stack but he only ever worked on two things it was two projects for a long time they were
big projects but he's like I didn't work on anything else even if I even if those projects were completely stalled and we were waiting like a month to do stuff he's like I would not work for a month and I was like what do you do in that time he's like well you do there are some trainings that you can do um you know I there a busy work that I could get done but he's like there's nothing I could do cuz those were my only projects that were assigned to me those were my projects
I was like that that sounds horrible I mean some people might love that because you're getting paid to do nothing but for people who really want to learn who want to progress their career who want to do big things um that's not fun and so big Tech is just it's at this point it's gotten to this point where you know if you want to make a difference if you want to work on things that are meaningful if you want to you know try out new tech stacks and learn new skills excuse me it's going to
be very difficult to do that unless you just have a great manager you have a great team that's super flexible and wants to help you with that um you're probably not going to get that uh one other thing and I didn't even write this down is as you work at bigger companies a lot of times you'll work with proprietary software that no other compan is going to use uh this was and have some friends who worked at meta this was particular at certain tech companies who have internal systems and software that they wrote from the
ground up that was only used at that company it was not used at any other company in the world and so they would learn this system they would use it for several years but it was completely non-transferable to any other company and I was like what's the benefit of that he's like well there's no benefit he's like unless I want to go back and work at let's say Facebook uh he's like there's no benefit to it uh it is really good for their use case for their company but any other company that would try to
adopt that software or do anything like that it would be worthless and so again it just points back to you aren't going to grow Beyond a certain point um and that's true in a lot of companies but at Big tech companies when you're really Niche down and you're pigeon hold into this one area working on one or two projects and you're using you know all this very specific software just for that company if then you want to go work in another company or you want to do something else it's hard to get away and then
you have this thing called golden handcuffs and that's another thing I wanted to talk about which is golden handcuffs is a very real thing um I somewhat experienced it at my previous job when I was a manager um but luckily it wasn't as bad for me because I had my YouTube thing and I had my Consulting thing on the side but you know I had good salary I was doing really well but I didn't feel like I was making a difference uh and a lot of people in Tech will tell you the same thing it
was like Hey I'm I'm making a lot of money I'm making 200,000 a year but I'm doing nothing and I'm going nowhere and uh I don't know what to do I can't really leave because my standard of living has increased I have a really expensive apartment I need to be able to afford it but I don't want to work here anymore and so you kind of get trapped and uh there's a very high correlation between things like suicide and depression and getting burnt out because of all these different factors and so uh just a few
just a few things let me look at my list really quick while I get a drink of water so the next thing and this is true for a lot of companies but again is very different at the tech level is this intense feeling of competition um I never really felt this at other companies um when I was working at Healthcare analytics or you know my old Fortune 500 company or my Consulting that I do a little bit of now but not as much and then of course like analyst Builder there's there's none of that but
I can tell you that you know from a lot of accounts this is something that is really intense especially at places like Google and Facebook these companies it's a competition of who can do it better who can do it more who can get more recognition and that's just like a really dog eat dog world it's not a Cooperative environment to get things done and so you know all of these things that I'm saying what you need to do is you need to kind of look at yourself and be like what am I what do I
value the most if it is money big Tech can still be a great option for you um although again you may not have a job for a long time in this current environment uh where Tech is at but if money is the main thing for you you don't have have a family you know you don't uh personally care about work life balance then I say go for it uh can I you'll learn a lot these companies are of course big and great because of you know their tech stocks and a lot of different things but
um it's not for everybody it's definitely not for everybody and so um I'm highlighting a lot of these areas and uh I'm going to go back to something I talked about earlier which is you know I've had a lot of companies uh ese as I've gotten larger my YouTube Channel's gotten larger and um my name's a you know a bit more known in the data Community I've had a lot of companies reach out in fact I've consulted with tech companies who then were like hey would you come work with us and my answer is always
no uh for a lot of reasons and the for me personally one of the biggest things that I am really against when it comes to working in big Tech is I'm prioritize my family above all of my work all of my YouTube all of my business all of those things and so for me personally I know that if I were to go and work at one of these big companies it would demand a lot from me it would take time away from my family and that's just a that's kind of a non-starter for me I'm
like I'm not even going to go in that direction and so you know maybe earlier on in my life when I was just getting started I absolutely would have taken one of these uh jobs but now that I have some more experience I'm going to a different stage of my life it's not even an option at this point I mean unless they were you know some tech company wanted to make me like head of C some Division and it was an insane amount of money to turn down I might do it for a year or
two I I might talk with my wife and be like hey you know this is going to be horrible uh it's going to take time away from the kids but in the short run you know I'll do it for maybe a year or two and then I'll pivot back to my other stuff and I can get it on my resume and I could um you know make it valuable to be able to take but it would be an extreme circumstance for that to happen and so I say all that to say big Tech had its
big run and there's still a lot of value at working at Big tech companies but it is not the same Prestige it is not the same pay it is not the same reliability and consistency that it used to be and so you know back in 2017 when I was first breaking in they still had a lot of those things they had the perks and the benefits and I wanted that um especially as like someone right out of college I really wanted that but it's not the same anymore and so you know I feel like these
perceptions and these things are some of them are still there that they're great places to work at you get all these benefits but it's just not there anymore um and a lot of people will tell you like people who used who worked at Facebook back in like 2015 who went back and worked with them again uh just someone I know who did that they were like it was completely different the vibe was different the culture was different the benefits were different um working a lot of people were working remote versus in person and he liked
working in person and so he's like everything was completely different and so I don't know how long he's going to work there but he said he probably wouldn't work there you know that long and so these are just things that you know I think a lot of money a lot of time a lot of uh people's thoughts and ideas have gone into thinking that there that Tech is just this amazing beautiful thing that's like a golden uh uh you know an opportunity to change your life and maybe it is for some I think for a
lot of people it's way overrated it is it is built up in society and in our heads and but the reality is just not living up to that and so uh that's what I that's a lot of my personal opinions as well as opinions of a lot of other people who have worked there now I'm going to reiterate it uh just one last time I never worked at Mig Tech I could I could probably call up some of the people reached out to me and be like hey you know if you want me to work
there I'll work there I could get it on my resume um and I'm sure people on YouTube would find that really interesting I could give my perspective but it just it isn't worth it um for me anymore it's not something that's even crossing my mind um I have no Ambitions or aspirations to do that I have analyst Builder which is my startup for edte I have my Consulting I have my YouTube um and I work with a lot of really interesting awesome people and I just it's not um not something I want anymore it's not
and so uh all that being said that's my opinion that's what I think if you have a completely different opinion maybe you work at one of these companies maybe you're like oh I work at you know Twitter or I work at Snapchat if that's still a thing I don't follow Snapchat uh that much anymore I'm sure it is still a thing but if you follow one of these companies and you're working at them let me know your opinion because maybe you have a completely different opinion than I do and you work there so you might
have a little bit more credibility than I do this is just my right this is just a jam SES we're just talking um let me see if there's anything else um I'm going to say that's it I'm going to say that's it that have a few more things but I touched on a lot of them as we went through it but um yeah let me know what you think uh I think that is pretty accurate it is Pretty stinking accurate so uh let me know below before we go um I do something on the end
of these episodes where I give you the vegetable the month I used to do these monthly now I just do them you know when I can uh cuz I have a lot of other responsibilities but um I'm going to give you the vegetable of the month uh and then you can go put that in the chat that tells me that you got to the very end which is I mean Bravo I did a lot of rambling I chatted for a long time I wasn't perfect uh definitely not perfect but uh I said what I needed
to say and so if you were able to get to the very end I I want you to go and put uh wait what was it see now you got to wait a little longer rudaba you need to put rudaba in the chat I don't know how to spell that that's up to you to figure out uh you know what don't even try to spell it just spell it phonetically the best you can rudaba um and that's it um believe it or not and this is going to be wild to everyone I don't have a
monitor here I just have laptops uh two laptops I don't have a monitor I bought a laptop a monitor for the first time ever I'm going to put it right over here in the corner of my office um my father-in-law recently got a 40in 4K TV that he uses as a monitor and I went over to his house uh out in Dallas not too Longo and he's like Alex you have to get one of these I'm like I'm not getting that's huge I'm not getting it's massive so I got a 27 in monitor for like
300 bucks um which all of them are like 500 to 1,000 so I got this one on eBay uh we'll see how it works I didn't want to pay a lot of money for it but I'm I think it's going to be a good thing it's supposed to be getting in today um so maybe I'll share something on uh like Instagram or something but uh what else is going on in my life I'm driving up to Pennsylvania it's an eight hour drive with three kids very soon it's like two weeks uh to spend Christmas with
my uh my wife's side of the family and so that's G to be a drive um we got three kids 12 five and four so wish me luck um just really wish me luck on that one what else do I have to say anything interesting um I don't know that's that's all that's going on in my life right now um business is going well Consulting has been really interesting um around the holidays I get a lot of people wanting me to promote their products and what's been really great about doing my own thing and starting
my own business is I don't have to take those anymore back in the day I used to and there were some companies that I kind of knew or heard of and I took their endorsements and I kind of you know wish I didn't have to but I need to pay the bills now I don't have to and so I get to choose who I sponsor and who I don't and so I take on very few sponsors um it's been really freeing and so this year I got the most amount of requests I've ever gotten it
was probably like a 100 plus of different companies and startups and AI products and data products and all these different things and people wanting me to speak at you know uh different conferences and and um all these different things and I just get to say no to all of them uh it's really freeing and back in the day I used to have to take some of them and I don't have to do that anymore and that's in huge you know uh U it's a huge benefit to you guys because you guys don't have to see
products that maybe you aren't as interested in or they're kind of a niche product where I like them but I know you guys wouldn't but I still promote them anyways um just because I like them I think they're a good product uh but now I don't have to do that it's a big part of from you guys uh you know helping me out on YouTube and watching my stuff or going to analyst Builder or just supporting me on social media those things help me a lot and so I just want to say I'm really appreciative
of that um it really it really allows me to be more selective in what I do how I do it and for that I just wanted to say thank you so uh all that being said I'm going to end it here thanks for uh thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one
