Small company or big company?

My experience is that the type of day-to-day work shifts pretty significantly as a company gets bigger, generally from "build new things" to "maintain existing things". At a big company, my view of "good engineering" was writing well-factored code and making systems robust and scalable. At a small company, my view of "good engineering" is intelligently taking shortcuts for faster prototypes when the final product is uncertain, or recognizing clever product solutions that can be built quickly to satisfy a user need.

If you want space to find a perfect solution for a well-defined technical problem, you probably want to work at a big company, and if you want messy open-ended problems where you get significant ownership over the product direction, you probably want to work at a small company.

I like Ben's writing a lot but I think he's not very familiar with just how much better FAANG is in expectation value for your typical engineer - i.e. at current compensation levels it would be possible to achieve financial independence by 35 or 40 for somebody joining out of college. I don't think Ben has a particularly steep utility curve for money so working at a mission-driven startup is probably great for him, but the landscape out there has changed since he was last looking for work.

The article creates a false dichotomy. A startup is not necessarily a small company and a big company isn't necessarily not a startup (depending on your definition anyway).

I understand the two categories are supposed to be generalisations but I think there's a middle ground worth mentioning: small businesses.

Large corporations are the "low risk, low reward" extreme. They stereotypically offer good job security (although this has become increasingly untrue) and career growth opportunities. They are more likely to offer stable working hours at market rate but also require a lot of red tape if you want to do anything new or exciting.

Startups are the "high risk, high reward" extreme: typically pay below market rate, terrible working hours but possibly exciting technology with lots of self-guided work and in some cases you may even be offered the equivalent of a lottery ticket.

However there are small (5-50) companies that offer more reasonable working hours and quality of life than a startup while also enabling you to "leave your mark". The difference is that unlike startups these aren't necessarily "growth oriented" but that doesn't mean they won't have an impact -- just that they don't have to grow their impact exponentially to avoid dying.

In my country (Germany) there are entire industries that are dominated by small companies. Sure, those industries aren't always the kind you can brag about (but then again neither is "I built the address widget on the Amazon checkout page" and if you're honest, nobody really wants to hear about how you worked on "Facebook for cats" or "Uber but with rickshaws" either) but they're a legitimate middle ground.

That said, I find it telling that the article seems to mostly disregard the actual question and focus on finances -- both by going into unnecessary detail about startup viability and by talking about salary and "revenue opportunities" but nothing else that's relevant to quality of life (except for multiple stabs against Microsoft, that is).

I think something this article misses is that it is much easier to get good information on all these things for the relatively small number of big companies than it is for the enormous number of start ups. Related to that, information you can get about start ups is much more likely to be obsoleted sometime within the duration of your employment.

To make this concrete, if you care about work / life balance, you can independently research the reputations of different big companies on that front. But for an arbitrary start up, the best you can do is often to ask them and hope you can suss out the degree of truth in their answer. Then if you do find a start up that really has good balance, it is (by definition) going to grow quickly, which often (but not always) results in that balance changing over time. Things change less quickly at big companies.

This isn't an argument in favor of either big companies or start ups, it's just an argument against the idea that "big company vs. start up does not add any information once you know what you care about"; I think it does.

If you want to know that you, personally, moved the needle, you should look for a small company. If you want the CEO to drop by at the company party, greet you, and acknowledge something awesome you did last month that he or she noticed... Small company.

There's some incredible job satisfaction perks that come with smaller companies.

But as others have pointed out, there's a difference between a "small company" and a "startup". The former is likely filling a need where it is, and is hopefully growing at a reasonable, but steady pace. A startup is a get rich quick scheme that's gonna be huge in the next couple years or wont exist anymore by then.

Smaller companies if you want to matter and "do things"; larger companies if you want to make money.

>> The determining factor in a startup’s success isn’t competition, it’s whether they can actually make something good enough that they don’t die.

That is so wrong. Very wrong. It's all about competition. If you work for a well-connected startup or a big corporation, it may feel like there is no competition... But the competition exists; they just never had a chance. The reality for most startups is that they're faced with impossible competition. Competition is everything.

>> You can tell whether a startup has [already] made something people want by whether it’s growing really quickly

People buy what they're told to buy. People don't actually buy what they inherently want or need - If they did, they wouldn't be so miserable and Facebook wouldn't be making so much money. "Make something people want" is a lie - The quote should be "Fool people into buying something they don't need".

More important than "big company" is the group of people you're working with at the big company. If you're working with some smart/motivated people and can avoid the management processes and overhead, it's a good combination of resources and autonomy. I worked in a group like this; we delivered projects and the managers stayed out of the way. They never said no to any training or software/hardware purchases. Then the bottom dropped out in 08....

I had written a medium article about my experiences. It based on what I see, won't be the truth for everyone

1. Freelance: It really depends on the project you accepted. There are a lot of tasks which some company can’t solve and asked for the freelancer to help. But there is also a lot of repetitive work like creating WordPress sites which don’t improve your skills at all.

2. Software Agency: If it is a small software agency, you will be expected to do MVP(Minimum Viable Product) for other startups/companies over and over. There is some software agency that helps to maintain the apps, which you can understand the issues that happened when scale.

3. Small Startup: Build fast, learn fast. Usually, don’t have enough people, you need to do everything in a breakneck pace. It is hard to get someone to guide you along the way, you have to learn from your mistakes or lousy code from the previous colleague.

4. Medium Startup: This might seems to be the perfect ground, I haven’t work for this type of company. The startups should have a standard in the software development process and able to introduce changes if it is good for the team.

5. Big Corporation: Depends on the team you joined. Chances are you are working for a small part of the whole system and don’t know how everything works when put together.

You can read the full article: https://medium.com/@cylim/my-first-year-working-in-the-it-in...

The article cites Microsoft as being bad for quality of life.

Despite I would do it again (for other reasons, NOT for quality of life), I think that my six years at Amazon have been way, way worse, and it's not just my own experience, it's what I've heard from colleagues or ex-colleagues at Microsoft, Google, etc.

If you describe Microsoft as bad for QoL, I'd describe Amazon as brutal, and Google as the pension for Amazonians.

Please, don't take any offense from what I shared, and also consider that it is still a personal point of view, not backed by large datasets or surveys.

I think it is still useful for HN to read my opinion about the subject.

Nitpick the 5% growth per week is for during YC, not at the point they are hiring you.

you can have overly large teams with burdensome processes in a small company

and lithe, efficient, empowering teams in a massive one.

Not that size doesn't have other implications -- but the specific people who work with/around you matter far more than the size of the company.

--which is to say, if size is the determining factor in your decision, you don't actually know what you're getting into either way

Is working at Microsoft under Satya Nadella still "dystopian" as the author mentions? If so, how?

Smaller companies if you want to work for free and have no benefits.

Big companies if you want the company to spend money on training you, good salaries, extra benefits and being to drop the job after going home for the day.