Too many software engineers?
As of 2021 there are about 4 million software engineers in USA https://qubit-labs.com/how-many-programmers-in-the-world/ a lot of them worked for big companies, names as Facebook, Microsoft, Apple etc…
The software engineers from these companies are like the rockstar of software engineers or that is what they think…
From some time to now on social media I've seen content creators announce they content with sentences like "My experience on Apple", "When I was layoff of Microsoft", "How a crack the Google interview", "My super ultra big fat salary on X tech company". etc…
As somebody that worked for two big companies and two small companies, I can say there is nothing different between engineers in a small software company that nobody has heard of before and the ones advocating being part of a big one. Most of the the day to day job is the same arguable we can say that sometimes the small company software engineers are better.
This is because small software engineers develop their job on multiple areas instead of just focusing on a single one. I've seen software engineers using Photoshop for edition, after writing queries for MySQL or write C++ for cloud solutions and swift for an App. While jobs for Software Engineers on big companies are well defined and most of the times you only do one thing, a Front-End engineer is not setting up pipelines on Jenkins and Data Base engineers are not doing CSS, on big companies everybody is a little nut, on small companies the engineers need to be the whole machine.
This doesn't imply that software engineers in big companies have limited knowledge, just means that you can focus your attention to a single area and go deep into that area. However there are populists believes that engineers in big companies are superior or that could be the reason that having the big company name on your resume get you more interviews, on the social media gets you more views.
In fact we haven't defined what is a good or bad software engineer yet and we would probably never do. Maybe we already have too many software engineers from big companies saying they worked for big companies.
