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Comment by jjguy | Hacker News Reader

Take the time to understand the whole system you work within, not just your little stovepipe.

That system may not be technical, but procedural. It will include other business functions. It may include your customers. In any system, there is a clear "start" and "end" that encompasses a complete process and reason for being.

You'll find that in most organizations, people stay in their little corner, do their little thing, not caring much about what happens to the left and right of them. That leads to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

If you understand the larger system, you'll be able to see opportunities others are blind to. Point a couple out and -if you're both respectful and right - it won't take folks long to think "man, this guy really gets it!"

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I like this a lot. When I first became engineer I went to our infrastructure team to have them explain to me what every tool we have does and how it fits into what we do. It took a few weeks but at the end of it, I could see the way the business ran much clearer than I did before. This helped me tremendously over the next few years.

A great way to do this: join a small startup. I did, and I learned more in the first week than I could have ever hoped to at my old job.

assuming both the startup and the "big company" you compare it to are great in their respective categories, I find it to be a wash. My career was split pretty 50/50 between startups and big companies (about half dozen of each as my sample size), I found them to be similar in term of learning. You just learn different things.

At a startup you're more likely to do everything and wear all the hats, see things from the beginning and build stuff from scratch. That also means you don't get to see as much of how tech debt can be efficiently paid off, how to maintain large systems, or can't have the hindsight 20/20 of all the solutions to problems startups face.

My early careers was mostly startups, and I felt I had learnt a ton. Then joined bigger highly successful tech companies, and realized there were much better ways to do everything I had seen (solutions that would have worked at the startup scale in many cases)

This advice echoes the first chapter in The Passionate Programmer. Recommended.

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