An "X" company tells you (and them -- that's why companies position themselves) how to think about what they do.
So WMX is "in the trash business": sure they have logistics, and surely some custom software, but what they do is pick up the rubbish and bring it to the dump. End of story.
So Google (the world's largest advertising company) is called a "tech" company because without continuous work on their advanced technology they'd lose almost all their revenue. (what the rest of the people employed there do -- who knows? Nothing else contributes meaningfully to revenue). FB the same. Companies as diverse as Rambus, Cisco, NVidia, Apple, Boom (if they still exist), WhatsApp, Twitter (once upon a time) Snowflake...etc: technology is the linchpin of their work. Even Tesla, but not, say, for their BIPV (the roof tiles), which are decades-old me-too technology with no R&D at all.
At the opposite extreme, why was WeWork considered a "tech" business?
Uber employs a lot of programmers but I don't think of them as a tech business: their competitive advantage is their business model and their moat is branding, and they are all about piece work in small scale transport. There are plenty of useful SaaS companies who connected some existing packages and came up with a good new business, but aren't in the technology business; if they dumped k8s or Airflow or whatever and changed their stack it wouldn't matter much (so they never will).
There was a time when one or two people could make a product and be a tech company (Visicalc, 1.2 programmers; Intuit, 1 programmer), but nowaday if you can get into revenue with one or two programmers I'd say it's not a tech business. Can be a great business, don't get me wrong, but value, like Uber's, will come from domain strength and marketing/branding.
And to be a bit ad hominem: there's a higher density of tech businesses in Silicon Valley and a much lower density in SF. You can tell because the nerds in boring suburbia worry about bits and bytes and the folks up north use phrases like "founder lifestyle".
Stripe. They are a payment processor and work in Finance. What significant contributions to tech have they produced? I'm not being snarky, I'm just not familiar with any off the top of my head like I know React came from FB/Meta, Google & Amazon produce all sorts of cloud computing stuff, Apple produces lots of libraries/frameworks (most likely for their own hardware/ecosystem), Bootstrap came out of Twitter, etc.
Providing an API abstracting over the complexity of payment processing is the technology.
Google's search engine is technology but you would probably say "isn't that just a researching documents"?
A bit weird how you only deem companies technological if they have released popular OSS or Apple because they produce libraries/frameworks they use internally. Pretty sure all software companies use internal libraries.
That just seems to feed the point to me. Google was competing with organizations particularly created for a new tech market that didn't exist before them. NYC library was maybe the largest player available to consumers? (Before the emergent search tech like alta vista and yahoo that Google disrupted.)
Stripe is a payment processor with the most disruptive automation, competing with other payment processors older than the web. Every industry will be shrinking in people per net work, few industries are new things (at least for the public) enabled by automation.
If we want to call all disruptors tech companies, why not also call the old companies that transform to compete with them tech companies too? Then every industry is tech. But really it is the opposite, tech as it ages becomes regular business that is more dependent on trademarks, relationships, etc, so some things we consider tech from recent decades are less so now and companies that stay primarily in them are more like old industry than tech companies that compete for the newly emerging fields.
U got be kidding me. I'm not from Stripe but fintech is insanely complex when you want to do the dirty work and untangle all kinds of legal and financial mess to provide services globally. They are not called aws for payment for no reason
Does that mean that any company doing finance is tech? If we, as a community, decide to tag every industry with "tech" like fintech, agritech, edtech, etc. to companies that are disrupting some industry it loses any meaning. Is every SaaS a tech company? Is disrupting the time tracking or invoice industry mean that is tech?
I think the qualifier is for companies that contribute something back, which many of those disruptor companies are using. Usually this contribution is some by-product since there are only a few companies who actually have main products as Tech.
Personally I avoid using the word "tech" and just say I do software stuff. Most people outside of computing just think its all the same anyhow ("can you help me with my wifi?" - In Laws, everywhere).
SaaS companies that are linking one business function to another where the entirety of the product is some software running on the cloud.
This isn't saying that they don't do development, but rather that they're not breaking new ground in tech. They aren't working on any cutting edge problems or developing frameworks to enable development at scale.
I worked at a company that did some logistics. There was an app for phones, some servers, and some software that did routing, provided ETAs to customers, and produced some reports.
I would lump it in the broad umbrella of "tech" but it isn't a company that's building the next big thing (or even small thing) that will change the world.
I'm the lead engineer at one of these and you nailed it. If I catch anyone "innovating" we have a talk about what it is they're working on to make sure it's part of our core business. It very rarely is.
I probably suck to work for in that way, but the reality is this is not a job about pushing the envelope, it's a job about executing as cleanly as possible. You work at one of these if you love to implement simple tech to solve non-tech problems, and I make that clear while hiring.
It's a moderately lucrative job, and can be very rewarding for certain types, but I totally understand if, coming from Google, it would be a system shock as it is decidedly not "tech" as most folks mean it.
Sometimes you have to NIH to understand why things the way they are. Granted, it's hard to justify on the company dime. From the perspective that 99% of software is awful and writing more is making things worse, I'm sympathetic to your position.
On the other hand, in my little corner of the world I've seen plenty of damage done by an "invent-nothing" mentality and an approach to software architecture that permits only plugging together popular open source components with fancy websites and corporate backing. For lack of a better term I call it "noun-driven development". You needed a disk reachable through an ssh server and an Apache directory listing, you ended up with Artifactory. You needed a library to replicate data with a Merkle tree, you ended up with someone's Kafka + etcd + memcached + redis + glusterfs Frankenstein monster, etc.
Isn’t this basically just saying “the way we’ve always done things here is optimal”? That is very rarely the case. Improvements, optimizations (even of a radical nature) are almost always possible. But yes it sounds like a lot of folks here would not like to work with someone so set in their ways.
The SaaS shop that I worked in had two Java devs, two JavaScript devs, a python gluer, and a mobile developer.
Building the even a basic framework takes hundreds of hours of developer time... for no real competitive advantage.
It's fine to work on innovative things (there was a point were something about Java annotations clicked and the report writing part got rewritten in a week)... but building big things that give small gains aren't viable in small shops.
Doing innovation on "how can we compress this web page even more" makes no sense at a small shop - if it's an issue grab Minify off the shelf and use that. Don't spend half a year writing your own that you'll need to support.
The small company is best served by working on things that give the competitive advantage - not working on those big ideas (unless that big idea is the competitive advantage).
Big tech companies have the advantage that they've got thousands of developers some of whom have some free time or the competitive advantage is removing another 200 bytes from a web page.
That small tech shop had 4000 hours of Java dev time to "spend" a year.. and another 4000 hours of JavaScript, and 2000 hours of python, and 2000 hours of android/iOS. There's a stack of 5000 hours of bugs and features for each of those parts of the app. Spending 500 hours of anyones time on something that can be solved off the shelf for under 10 hours to integrate is far from an optimal use of time.
