Protecting your time from predators in large tech companies

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2025-01-18 23:00:13

If you’re a competent software engineer at a large tech company, your time is in very high demand. Lots of people will want you to do things1. You should be very selective about how you handle these requests, and definitely avoid saying yes to everyone.

Helping other people feels good. That’s doubly true when those people are from other parts of the company. It feels like you’re having the kind of cross-org impact that a staff+ engineer ought to be having. But helping other parts of the org is not your main job. Delivering projects is your main job. It’s a common trap to spend your time too generously and neglect the projects that are your actual responsibility. To avoid it, you should identify the people who are trying to claim your time.

Large tech companies are full of predators: people who want to extract uncompensated work from competent engineers who are generous with their time. Once a predator identifies a good target, they will routinely send work to that person via DMs instead of going through normal channels. “Uncompensated” is a key word here. When your manager asks you to do work, that isn’t predatory, because you’re being paid for it and (hopefully) rewarded for it at review time. When a colleague asks you to do work, that isn’t predatory, because they’re in a position to do you a favor as well. Predators are asking you to do work that gives them a lot of value but doesn’t do anything for you (or is even harmful). Let’s look at some examples.