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Comment by manquer | Hacker News Reader

It really depends on kind of person OP is, Personally I never want to work at any large corporation especially Google, the benefits do not outweigh the drawbacks for me.

Apart from what others mentioned in the thread In the startup choice the biggest benefit not going the Google for me is that I choose to work in a domain(by choosing the startup) where I am passionate about, slim chance of it happening in a large organization.

OP has to understand what he gets and does not get at both outside of pure comp and then figure out how much of value they are to him

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IMO one of the best things about working for Google is that it's so easy to move between teams to e.g. find the domain you want to work in.

While it's true that you may not have many options for your first team (unless you are already a domain expert, in which case you may get funneled into your domain), if you are performing well for your current team, it is extremely easy to move around.

I say this a a Googler who was originally slotted into a team that was fun but not what I was really into. I swapped teams a couple of times and found something much better for me.

So easy relative to what, I wonder? I was slotted into a team which was neither fun nor anything I am into, and never managed to transfer. They said my manager wouldn't be able to block me from transferring, but he did so anyway, and I ended up leaving Google. There was nothing about the process which felt like it was any easier or less political than what I've seen at other megacorporations.

Well, easy relative to a startup which has just one engineering role (wear all the hats). In the startup world, changing roles generally means going through the interview process at a new company, starting over on seniority, vesting schedules, etc.

I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience at Google. It is a large company, so I don't doubt that there are dusty corners with bad management. But I've seen a pretty broad cross-section of the company and find most of it to be quite great in terms of mobility.

> easy to move

You need to stay ~12 months in your initial team; if your performance rating is bad (non-trivial chance of that after 1st year), no other team would ever touch you and you'll be slowly driven out (rare exceptions happen). 18 months used to be average stay of a Googler inside company. If you are out of luck with your team/boss, you are done internally, and this happened to many clever developers. You'd also have to get used to usual corporate CYA, internal politics and all the fun that comes along, with many developers barely doing anything but excelling in those "soft" metrics. Smaller chance of that in a startup with strong pre-selection, a mission and personal relationships, if it has solid funding.

Add to this the tendency to promote quality engineers to mediocre or outright bad managers. I witnessed a bad manager destroy the Google careers of virtually every engineer on his team.

Still, I would strongly recommend accepting the offer. Despite the drawbacks it's a great learning experience.

Interesting that you say "never" vs. "never again"…

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