You worked at Big Tech. We get it. A Rant About the People Who Can’t Shut Up About Their Big Tech Past

I once met a guy at a conference who mentioned that he’d worked at Apple before he even told me his name.

We were standing in line for coffee. I said, “Hey, how’s it going?”
He said, “Well, when I was at Apple…”
Sir. They haven’t even asked you what milk you want in your latte. Why are we already at Cupertino?

This isn’t rare. There’s an entire species of former Big Tech employees who simply cannot participate in a conversation without name-dropping their ex. They’re like the guy who brings up his college girlfriend on every first date. "We used to be so aligned, you know? She just got me."

Except in this case, the girlfriend is Meta. And you're now working at a fintech startup with a broken Notion doc and no dedicated researcher headcount.

Eight minutes. That’s the maximum these folks can go without referencing Google, Meta, Amazon, or Apple. I’ve timed it. After that, their bodies start to vibrate with unreleased credentials. You’ll see the vein in their forehead twitching like they’re trying to hold in a sneeze made of résumé bullets.

Let’s be fair. Working in Big Tech is impressive. The scale is wild. The problems are complex. The snacks are free. No one’s saying your time at Amazon didn’t teach you something. But the problem is that many of these folks exit the FAANG ecosystem and assume that everything they did there maps 1:1 to the rest of the world. It doesn’t.

You worked on a platform with 1.2 billion users. Congratulations. I’m currently trying to figure out if our six-person team can afford to test a prototype without sacrificing next quarter’s research budget and/or someone's firstborn child. Your story about the internal taxonomy system you helped define in 2018 is beautiful, but it is not going to help me decide whether to run a diary study or intercepts in a pharmacy waiting room.

We get it. At Meta you had 20 researchers working on a single product surface. At Apple, design reviews were sacred rituals involving candles, 18 stakeholders, and a man in a black turtleneck whispering, "♫ Élégance ♬."

At Amazon, you had a fully automated participant recruitment pipeline and a dedicated team of statisticians who did power analysis in their sleep.

But you’re not there now.

Now you’re working with two other researchers and a PM who thinks “qualitative” means “vibes.” We don’t have a mixed-methods council. We have a Slack thread titled “do we need to test this?” You’re trying to drop a nuclear UX bomb in a Nerf gun fight. And yet, in every meeting, you can’t help yourself.

You interrupt someone explaining their research plan to say, “Back at Google, we had a system that would suggest the optimal method for a project based on historical outcomes.”

That’s amazing, Jason. I have a Google Doc, a half-baked screener, and a participant who ghosted me twice.

You propose multi-method triangulation across three continents and two time zones and act confused when the team says, “Can we just start with five interviews?”

You look disappointed. Like you’ve been asked to play jazz flute in a kazoo band.

But here’s the thing: this is where the real work is. This is where your skills actually get tested.

Big Tech is Disneyland for researchers. Everything’s funded, every method is respected, and half the company thinks “NPS delta” is an actual business KPI. Out here? It’s the Oregon Trail of UX. You don’t always get the luxury of perfect methods. Sometimes you do a usability test in a hallway with your laptop on a recycling bin. And sometimes, just sometimes, it’s still good research.

If you can’t flex, can’t adapt, can’t let go of the rituals of your former org — then your Big Tech experience becomes a performance, not a contribution.

We’re not asking you to forget your past. But you’re no longer building for a user base larger than the population of Canada. You’re working on a platform with 12,000 MAUs and a backlog that includes both "redesign nav" and "fix the logo that says 'Logn In'."

It’s not your prestige that helps here. It’s your ability to translate that experience to the current context. To say, “Here’s what I learned with 50 researchers — now let’s figure out how to do it with 1.5 humans and a coffee budget.”

So yeah. You worked at Google. We know. You’ve mentioned it. Several times. You’ll mention it again. That’s fine. But just know — the longer you talk about how it was done “back at Amazon,” the more the rest of us are trying not to say:

“Back at reality…”

Bring your skills. Bring your rigor. Bring your ideas.

Just maybe… bring them without the TED Talk.

We’ll thank you for it.

(And if you make it 10 minutes without saying “when I was at Meta,” we’ll bake you a cookie.)

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