Against Big Tech Credentialism

This piece criticizes the culture of credentialism in big tech, arguing that job titles, years of experience, and brand-name company affiliations are poor proxies for real expertise. It begins by noting how accessible senior employees are - via interviews like those of YouTuber Ryan Peterman - and warns against assuming their authority. Drawing on a ten-year tech career, it emphasizes how luck and context often shape progression, how seniority can breed overconfidence, and how rigid hierarchies and status signaling discourage admission of mistakes. The author invokes Zen’s "beginner’s mind" to argue for humility and points out that many senior roles devolve into bureaucracy - meetings, stakeholder coordination, and documentation - rather than substantive engineering work.

The practical recommendation is to concentrate on durable technical skill and critical thinking about system design rather than revering titles. Engineers should prefer lessons from unconventional thinkers, older practitioners outside contemporary big tech, and those who actually write and ship code, and they should broaden perspective by studying the humanities. Over-reliance on big-tech norms produces "company men" who are comfortable with organizational rituals but weak at engineering; resisting that tendency and cultivating humility, curiosity, and kindness is the central prescription.