Why You Should Reconsider Your ‘Big Tech’ Job in 2025
As Big Tech layoffs continue, software engineers are finding it harder to make the hop from tech job to tech job.
Maybe you don’t need to?
Increasingly, developers are looking toward traditional companies — in older sectors like healthcare, banking and manufacturing — that have found themselves accidental tech companies — in pursuit of steadier employment and more work-life balance.
Despite Big Tech’s downturn, tech teams at traditional companies across industries are continuing to grow.
Now, they’re doing what they can to attract tech talent. This ranges from a massive push toward systems modernization and cloud migration to stand-out benefits. For example, 163-year-old manufacturing and mining company Sandvik recently added a global 14-week paid parental leave policy — while Netflix may be rolling back its “unlimited” leave policy.
Last year’s focus on developer experience continues in an effort to retain talent, too. Gartner predicts that a whopping 80% of all organizations will invest in an internal developer platform by next year, and giants like Capital One are investing in expanding their DevEx teams. Pfizer has added “principal engineer” to its company hierarchy as a path for technical progression.
But how do you decide whether to leave the allure of Big Tech? How can you make sure you can continue to grow and learn at these older companies? The New Stack talked to engineers who have taken that leap — and not looked back.
What Is a Tech Company?
If you ask senior software developer Aria Stewart, there’s almost no such thing as a tech company — or perhaps all companies are.
Having moved back and forth between tech startups and traditional companies, Stewart has found some patterns that may warrant your consideration. Their definition of a Big Tech job has become, “working in software development [and/or] working on specifically disrupting an existing industry by switching to software control systems.”
But, they warned, Big Tech — and its ecosystem of venture capital (VC), hyper-growth and disruption — isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: “That’s where some of the bad behavior comes from because they are fundamentally trying to act as a disruptive force.”
A traditional company doesn’t have to disrupt because it is usually already profitable, “which means that they’re making strategic but bounded decisions because they’re not going to sacrifice their profitability to disrupt an industry,” Stewart said. “Whereas, the VC playbook is to hand gobs of money to money-losing companies as a bet that one of them will be able to disrupt an industry enough to make a payoff.”
At any type of tech company, Stewart advised always asking in an interview: How does this business make money?
“In a startup or a Big Tech company, usually the employees are not particularly concerned with it, especially because they’re throwing speculative money at things where it’s not connected to profit yet,” they said. But, “in a big company, you have to know what the company actually does, where does it make its money, and how? And it’s not always obvious.”
What’s the Right Decision for Right Now?
While both kinds of companies leverage technology, at different times of your life, you may want to work at one or the other.
A big part of Big Tech startup culture is ambition. It brings with it long hours filled with life-long lessons and a high risk for the burnout that’s so pervasive in the tech industry. That full-on experience can be like placing a bet — that may only pay off if you reach the coveted unicorn status.
“In four years in Silicon Valley, I worked for three different tech firms — each existed less than five years — due to company bankruptcies and acquisitions,” one data analytics director told The New Stack. “I learned and grew a lot, but it wasn’t the environment for me, understanding someday I wanted to raise a family.”
While working at a tech startup carries prestige, saying goodbye to that culture has multiple advantages.
Once he became a parent, he moved to manufacturing and never looked back, choosing traditional over tech startup for three main reasons:
- A well-established company culture.
- Work-life balance.
- Risk aversion.
These benefits are usually only possible because many non-tech industries aren’t aiming for disruption, Stewart argues, but rather effectiveness.
“Working in non-tech industries is stable,” Stewart said, reflecting on a recent role at a contract research organization, where U.S. regulations required a slower pace with detailed audit logs. This resulted in a development process they described as “very high code review, very high standards. Everything was done slowly and carefully, and breaking things wasn’t an option.”
If something inevitably did break, it wasn’t just about an easy fix, Stewart said. It would trigger an examination of the processes and technology that permitted the error or bug. This all happened in the cloud and a modern tech stack, with tight feedback cycles with their user base. “Our focus on that rigor with the team let us go as fast as possible to develop good software.”
Benefits of Developing for an Established Company
While working at a tech startup carries prestige, saying goodbye to that culture has multiple advantages.
“It has the stability of a big old company,” Magnus Rosén, manufacturing systems architect and software developer at Sandvik, told The New Stack.
Having moved there from a tech startup, he reflected, “You don’t have to be afraid that it goes bankrupt next month or next year. And when I started, I was also impressed that they have processes for everything.”
Everything was set up when he joined — versus having to put his computer together, as he did at his previous job.
Indeed, a lot of tech startups are just figuring out roles, meaning you’re often expected to do a little bit of everything. Companies with well-established HR departments and processes tend to be better prepared to welcome junior engineers with comprehensive onboarding, training and progression plans.
“Sandvik was actually my first job in the manufacturing industry at an old-school company. Also, the first big, big company,” Rosén said.
“I was a bit skeptical at first, because you heard rumors about these old companies that are very slow and not so fast when it comes to decisions or technologies,” he continued, but he soon realized that long-time employees bring domain knowledge that allows them to make quick decisions. Indeed, manufacturing has the highest retention rate across all major industries.
Having a greater sense of job security allows Sandvik’s team to balance their personal growth: They can hone their existing technical skills at the same time, experiment with innovative new technologies, and even see experiments go all the way through to the testing stage, Rosén said.
Much of his work is with CAD and CAM software. While these technologies are decades old, they are still in high demand for the manufacturing industry. But Sandvik is also embracing emerging technologies. For example, it ran more than 20 AI-related initiatives in 2024, such as implementing AI functions within its software. Using natural language chatbots trained on domain-specific large language models, documentation can be offered electronically in lieu of heavy manuals.
And if a traditional company isn’t fully in the cloud yet — an estimated 70% of the Fortune 500 are still somewhere on that journey — it is most likely in the midst of that digital transformation, understanding it’s a key way to attract the next generation of developers.
But Could It Hold Back Your Career?
Software engineers often work for so-called FAANG and other Big Tech companies because they want that resume clout or worry that older organizations will keep them technologically behind.
It could actually be the opposite.
“We are responsible for everything from coming up with ideas to implementing it and then running it on the cloud,” Rosén explained, calling his innovation work “very cradle to grave,” as Sandvik works to modernize the tech stack and migrate to the cloud.
To be fair, while most university degrees and boot camps focus on building greenfields, that’s not the reality anywhere but the most nascent startups. Even at the most coveted Big Tech companies, technical debt and spaghetti code present daily challenges.
Traditional organizations typically have clearer, longer-term strategies that allow developers to be connected to both technical and business objectives — and to feel more of a sense of accomplishment.
And across companies of all sizes and sectors, documentation remains a huge problem. There’s a rush at these traditional organizations to get in fresh talent to pass on domain knowledge as those who built the tech are often approaching retirement.
“It makes it even more important that we try to simplify software and solutions to attract new, young people,” Rosén said, offering a deep motivator in traditional industries. “It needs to be simplified and improved to attract young talent.”
Traditional Companies Modernize to Compete for Talent
Recruitment has been a major motivator of the manufacturing company’s continued digital migration. Sandvik has also added benefits like increasing global parental leave, offering a choice between extra pay or days off, and profit sharing.
Traditional organizations typically have clearer, longer-term strategies that allow developers to be connected to both technical and business objectives — and to feel more of a sense of accomplishment.
At these older companies, Stewart said, you’re making careful choices without the threat of running out of money in 18 months. “You’re planning five years ahead. You’re making careful choices.”
This all being said, “I was surprised that it’s more tech-y than I thought,” Rosén reflected on his own experience at Sandvik. “It feels like a tech company, more than a tool-making company.”
This is certainly a message companies in more traditional sectors will use to bring their own disruption in 2025 — as they compete for the 44% of the tech industry that are planning to leave their jobs this year.
