He hit a tech trifecta, working at Google, Meta, and OpenAI. He has some advice for finding success in Big Tech.
Michael Bolin is the tech lead on Codex, OpenAI’s coding assistant. Before joining Sam Altman’s AI giant in 2024, Bolin spent almost 12 years at Meta, per his LinkedIn. Before that, he worked at Google on tools that have stood the test of time, like the company’s Calendar.
On “The Peterman Pod,” Bolin shared three steps for making an impact in Big Tech. While they’re certainly helpful at companies like Google and Meta, the tips extend well beyond Silicon Valley to almost every white-collar worker.
His first step is personal: figure out what you like to do. “It’s good to broaden that, but it’s also good to be honest with yourself,” Bolin said.
Bolin referenced a “hero quest” that he went on at Google. He thought there would be a challenge that all the other engineers couldn’t solve that he could, he said. Bolin called it “embarrassing” because there’s “something about ego” involved.
The problem with this quest was also that he didn’t love the work. “I can do a lot of things, but there is a smaller subset of things that I genuinely enjoy doing,” he said.
Bolin’s second step was to find out what’s “really valuable” to your employer.
Here, he uses the counterexample of his time at Google yet again. “I did stuff that I was really excited about, but it wasn’t AdWords for Google or anything like that,” he said.
Finally, workers should find the intersection between Bolin’s first and second steps — and then lean into it.
That intersection might not be in your current workplace, something that Bolin calls a “challenge.” To get ahead, workers might have to “go somewhere else to make that happen.”
The steps are consistent, no matter where you’re working. Know what you want, know what your employer wants, and live in the cross-section of the two.
“The more that you can do that, the more successful you’re going to be,” Bolin said.
Do you work in Big Tech? Contact the reporter from a non-work email and device at hchandonnet@insider.com, or on Signal at henrychand.30
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