When applying for a job at a tech company, it's important to understand how they make money because it affects the structure and priorities within the business (and your potential role). Companies enabled by technology have various business models. For example, Amazon earns a small percentage of every sale in its marketplace. It also has a separate business renting servers and offering subscriptions to cloud software ("Software as a Service"). Facebook and Google primarily sell advertising to businesses. A design agency may charge for consulting services or project work. A young startup may have millions of dollars in funding, but only a plan for making money (an as yet unproven business model).

Software enables exciting businesses because digital products and processes generally have "less friction" than real-world products. It's easier to create value for huge numbers of people with software. The digital world is continually evolving and growing, making it possible to offer new products and services.

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Tech companies change dramatically as they grow. Early-stage startups have a very flat organizational structure. Work is highly collaborative, creative, and self-driven. Priorities can be unclear and goals may change often. It may even feel like the company is barely surviving from one milestone to the next. This might sound too chaotic to some people, but exciting to others. Startups can be a rewarding way to learn new skills and feel autonomous in your work.

Larger companies have much more defined roles, goals, and processes. The work you do may move slower or require wider approval, but ultimately have more impact. Job security is generally a bit better at a bigger company, with a clearer path towards skill and level advancement.

Compensation at tech companies is made up of salary, equity (stock options), and benefits (healthcare and other perks). Salaries at startups tend to be less, with a greater emphasis on equity. Startups offer equity to make you feel like you have "skin in the game." The value of your equity at a startup will be hard to calculate, but the idea is: the more successful the company, the more valuable your equity. At a larger company, salaries will likely be higher, with the equity portion being more predictable, but still not guaranteed. Larger companies are more likely to offer bonuses and better benefits like gym memberships and on-site lunches.

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In your role with a tech company, your responsibilities will likely overlap with the core process of building software.

Product Managers plan the features that will solve customer problems. Designers interview customers and invent User Experiences to engage users. Project Managers work with their teams to break the features into completable tasks and work out any dependencies between tasks. It’s very common to use an “agile” process with 1-3 week sprints (groups of tasks). It’s considered agile because the team has the ability to complete and ship work and potentially change their focus with every sprint (as opposed to having long projects that take many months).

Software engineers write and review code, and automated tests for that code. Engineers (aka developers or programmers) may be specialized in a particular domain (web, database, mobile, front-end, back-end) or they may be “full-stack” meaning they can work on any part of the code base. After the code is built (compiled into a runnable format), it is likely tested by Quality Assurance (QA) workers in a staging environment before being deployed to production. Depending on the complexity of the architecture there may be specialized DevOps (developer operations) engineers for managing the deployed code and infrastructure.

Once in production, the software is monitored for bugs, and customer engagement is measured for future planning.

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As you look for a job in tech, you’ll inevitably encounter the terms B2B and B2C. They are terms that explain whether the company sells to individuals (thus, Business-to-Consumer, or B2C), or to companies (thus, Business-to-Business, or B2B). For example, a company that sells payroll software would be B2B, whereas a company that sells a fitness phone app would be a B2C. Why does this matter? As you’ll see in the guide, the type of customer will determine which teams exist within a company, how large they will be, and what their responsibilities are. For example, a company that sells accounting software (B2B) will probably have a large Sales team, whereas a company that sells a fitness phone app (B2C) will probably have a large Marketing team.

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