Zuora
- I advise young engineers today to work for Fortune 500 companies, not Big Tech.
- Corporations are building real, cutting-edge, cool products, not chasing moonshots.
- Meanwhile, Big Tech has become the soul-sucking corporate machine.
After graduating with a Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia, Jon Weisz jumped into the tech industry, working for a robotics startup in Baltimore before arriving at X, Alphabet's vaunted "moonshot factory." He joined a team working on an all-purpose robot for space exploration, which sounded great on paper. Today, however, he's working on a project for a different kind of tech company: John Deere.
"In general, I loved my time at Alphabet and at X, but there's a reason why I didn't go back for another round of Big Tech jobs," Weisz said. "I wanted to ship an autonomous product that has an actual impact on stakeholders. One that addresses a huge problem — sustainable agriculture. There is no magic at Big Tech companies, there's only money. And it's often pretty naive money, chasing made-up projections for future revenues for moonshot projects that no one is currently relying on."
I also started my career in big tech, joining Oracle, then Salesforce when it was a startup, and eventually cofounding my own company, Zuora, and taking it public, where I still serve as CEO.
But if I were an aspiring young engineer today, I would follow Weisz's example. I wouldn't send my résumé to Apple, Amazon, or Alphabet. I would send it to companies like Nike, Honeywell, Volvo, Boeing, Whirlpool, or GM.
Why? Technologists are creative, driven people who do not find purpose in profitable inertia. There's a danger in being around what you really want to do, without actually doing it. And Fortune 500 companies simply don't have the luxury of buying talent just to park it.
6 out of 10 tech jobs are not in tech
There used to be two basic options for young software developers: work at a big Silicon Valley firm on a cool new stack or at a Fortune 500 firm on less exciting, older, legacy solutions.
But thanks to the cloud and the emerging technologies it supports, such as AI, that distinction no longer exists. When you spend time at the software arm of a Fortune 500 company, working with cutting-edge technology, it feels like you're at a tech company. Sometimes the snacks are even better.
Today, six out of every 10 technology jobs in this country exist outside the "technology industry," according to CompTIA, a nonprofit tech-certification provider. And that number is only growing.
Everyone, especially younger Gen Z workers, wants meaningful jobs — wants their work to have an impact. But what happens when you go to work at a place like Facebook or Google? These places are notorious for hiring smart coders out of college and then treating them like Pachinko balls — where you wind up is anyone's guess.
You might get slotted into sales engineering, or IT support, or (God forbid) marketing. Or you might get put on a moonshot project that sounds cool on paper but has no viable path to being a widely used, much less profitable, career-building product.
Or let's say you crush your performance reviews and work your way up the ladder. What happens then? Well, if you're not careful, you might Peter principle yourself into a meaningless middle-manager position. Your job is to go to meetings all day. Maybe your project ships, maybe it doesn't, but you've essentially evaporated yourself.
In both situations, you're trying to do the right thing, but you're swimming in false positives. It's really hard to get perspective when you're sitting on a fountain of money inside a vast organization with a single monolithic profit center (advertising, phones, e-commerce, etc.). It can also be really hard to get anything actually done.
Real products making real money
We're seeing a startling role reversal when it comes to technology and innovation. Today, Big Tech is the soul-sucking corporate machine, and the Fortune 500 is where all the cool shit is happening.
Right now, thousands of companies are committing real resources toward cutting-edge technology projects that are intended to be used by real customers and generate real money. Industrial giants are weaving new digital services around their home appliances and factory machines, turning them into futuristic "smart" products.
Consumer-goods companies, which make the products lining the shelves of grocery stores and retail outlets, are also reimagining themselves with new technologies, from robotic cleaning tools to AI-generated, personalized packaging. And as AI's capabilities grow, it creates massive opportunities for even the oldest and most well-established companies.
I know, because I'm seeing it happen on my servers at Zuora. We provide a service that helps companies monetize their digital services. And my company is witnessing this digital transformation in real time.
Today, many of our clients are outside the tech industry, and they're spinning up new projects like crazy. Recurring revenue is a good proxy for tech innovation, and according to our Subscription Economy Index report, subscription-based companies in the SEI have grown 3.7 times faster than product-based companies in the S&P 500 over the past 11 years.
Today, all companies are tech companies, and they all want to see more recurring revenue in their business models, which means they need smart, restless engineers. The average big-industrial company, for example, expects its share of revenue from software to double over the next three years. And yet less than 7% of all software revenue accrues to non-tech companies. I see this as a huge opportunity.
John Deere, for instance, is using satellite, AI, and data analytics in its farm equipment.
"It's really exciting to be able to talk to real customers, work in the field, and solve real problems," Arefin Nowshad, another engineer for John Deere, said. "After working at places like Tesla and Hulu, I was also looking for a stable, remote-friendly company with clear priorities and a sustainable work-life balance."
Let's give Big Tech its due. They still occasionally ship cool stuff. We wouldn't have ChatGPT without the help of Microsoft, for example. But as billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel famously said, "We wanted flying cars. Instead, we got 140 characters."
Well, guess who's working on flying cars? GM, that's who.
And there are thousands of other big swings happening in the Fortune 500 right now. Philips has committed to using telehealth to improve the lives of 2.5 billion people a year by 2030. Ford has invested billions to develop the next generation of EV batteries. Nike is building a new technology hub in Atlanta to focus on supply chains and AI. And there are scores of publicly traded companies involved in space exploration.
If you were to coalesce all of the exciting projects happening in these companies today into a single entity, you would be staring at the greatest technology company in the world, one that is pushing the boundaries on everything: robotics, machine learning, edge computing, IoT, virtual reality, genomics, 3D printing, drones, AI.
Go work for that company.
Tien Tzuo is the cofounder and CEO of Zuora, a company created to tackle the complex billing structures of subscription-based and other recurring-revenue business models. Before Zuora, Tzuo was employee No. 11 at Salesforce, building its original billing systems and holding a number of executive roles. Tzuo holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Cornell and an MBA from Stanford.