The Myth of Meritocracy in Tech Corporations

I hate working in the corporate software world. There, I said it. Now, don’t fire me just yet, as I still need the money.

At first, I liked it; it was a challenging environment, and the company I worked for was small and had many strong engineers to learn from. But then, I gained experience, became more senior, and the company I worked for got bought by a behemoth.

That behemoth was anything but well-run, but it made billions. Looking around and hearing from friends working at other large companies, I heard similar stories of corporate incompetency… and yet they also still made billions! So who am I to criticize? Me, a lowly software engineer, not even some type of fancy executive or director?

Surely tech executives were technical ninjas who also developed incredibly strong interpersonal skills, a rarity in engineering? No. They learned to play a different game well. What that is, I honestly don’t quite know, and I am not interested in it as it seems utterly soul-crushing. But if I had to take a guess, I would think the following skills are required:

Insane ambition and stopping at nothing to achieve your financial goals, which includes a malleable ethical compass. The ability to flatter your bosses and seem like you’re killing it at whatever you’re doing, with a cool Clint Eastwoodian demeanor. Some charismatic ability to inspire confidence. An unnaturally high level of self-esteem and self-image.

Not any skills that particularly speak to me. Why? Because they all assemble to create a sparkly veneer with no real substance behind it (except for all the lowly employees beneath who do the real earth-moving work). It’s like social media; it’s all about keeping appearances.

Now, there certainly are executives who bring incredible changes to companies. I can believe that. But who works so well that they deserve a $4 million salary with another $4 million in bonuses for the work they do? Do they really achieve 40–100 times the amount of value that lower employees on the hierarchical ladder make? I think not. And I’m not even talking about public company CEOs making hundreds of times what the average employee in their company makes, because supposedly they are 200x more efficient than they were in the 1940s based on the salary differences between 1940 and today.

Anyways, why do I care so much, particularly about tech executives (and also tech directors beneath them)? Because, in general, they are technically unsound. Some, profoundly.

They usually start their careers in engineering or computer science but quickly realize they either (a) don’t like it, (b) are not good at it, or © both (a) and (b).

Then, the horizontal move starts. Management it is. They climb up the ladder.

Then, they fall in love with new ideas and want them implemented by their department because it’s going to revolutionize the business. Think microservices and AI. In some instances, these sure make sense, but in many, they don’t. And I’ve run into many use cases where it was the worst decision made.

But they don’t seem to care. Failures to choose the right approaches, which should have been left to technical people under their level, are transformed into “learning experiences” and multi-year success plans, and sometimes “company transformations.” I guess it keeps us employed, so I won’t complain about that.

But from a technical perspective, it’s difficult for good engineers to work on meaningless and stupid tasks. If we know that moving to microservices is dumb because we had a performant monolith and moving away from it means transforming how we do everything and introducing multi-year risks, it’s not motivating. It’s a dumb decision. Made by a set of incompetent executives. But it’s okay; the CEO and all the other non-technical employees and stakeholders will just applaud the executive board’s sheer brilliance in the update to the boat’s course.

And yes, sometimes microservices make sense, but like many behemoths are finding out these days, starting in the 2010s, they went into it with a little too much enthusiasm and are backtracking now.

And it’s not just technical incompetence that I’ve faced in the corporate world. What the executives should be brilliant at, they sometimes suck at. Think resource allocations and hiring people.

How many times have I seen the corporate body decide to push out hyper-experienced engineers who hold so much institutional knowledge only to replace them with newbies who have everything to learn?

Yes, they may be cheaper because you laid off two-thirds of your North America team for a far cheaper India team, but in some instances, I’ve even seen it for our experienced and incredibly skilled India team to be replaced by new, cheaper Indian employees. And in many cases, these newbies are far inferior.

Sure, they’re cheaper in the immediate, but how many years of experience have we just lost? How much will our sprint velocity be affected (terms the corporate world loves)? How much determination and motivation in remaining employees was wiped?

What astounds me most in the operating of some of these large corporations is how inefficient they are and yet how much money they make. It’s unbelievable.

So there you have it. If you were always aspiring to becoming a CTO, Chief Technical Officer, or some other fancy-pants Chief Scientist, while you do need the appropriate diplomas, you can forego technical expertise and instead replace it with a lot of personal development, in the self-esteem and self-image arena. And you will make millions, which is much more than you would ever make as an actual implementer of solutions in the low rings of software engineering.