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I joined a startup for stability once. It was way more stable than the megacorp I left.

I think it depends on your definition of stability.

Megacorp: The company won't disappear overnight, but you might get tossed around different positions and have projects you've spent a year on shut down out of nowhere.

Startup: The company itself may shut down, but in the meantime everything is more focused and transparent.

In some sense the startup is lower cognitive load, because everything is great until it all implodes and then you look for a new startup. A punctuated equilibrium. At a megacorp, everything is vaguely doomed all the time, but never so clearly doomed that it's obvious when to make a move, and you spend a lot of time reading political tea leaves so as not to end up on the wrong project.

The worst thing that most big companies do is continue to employ good people on long death marches.

"Vaguely doomed all the time" nicely much sums up my most recent bigcorp experience.

Easy to end up on a soul-destroying maintenance project that you can't leave because it's business-critical and nobody else wants to do it.

Haha, nicely said. I'll add reading political tea leaves to my skills.

Instability is 3 teams in a year, due to projects being shutdown or transferred.

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