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Comment by scottrogowski | Hacker News Reader

I worked for Hipmunk for a little over two years before they were purchased and have some fond memories of my time there. There have been a lot of articles on HN lately suggesting that it is better to work for a large company over a startup. Based on my time there, I would strongly disagree. I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term) and during my time, touched basically every part of the web application - backend and frontend. I made a lot of mistakes and through it all, I left significantly more experienced than I was when I started. I don't think there was a better place I could have spent my time at that stage of my career. My advice would be, do work for a startup. Even better, try to work for a startup like Hipmunk with an experienced senior engineering team who have worked on some hard problems - like how to scale Reddit in the era before AWS. You'll learn a lot.

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But a lot of larger companies have great programs for junior developers that ensure they learn a lot.

In my experience and stories I've heard it seems that you can have an amazing time as a junior developer at a startup. If it's a good one. It it isn't, you'll be absolutely miserable and have no support. Similarly, you can be at a large company with a fantastic program for junior developers and learn a lot. And you can also work at an awful large company where you'll learn nothing. "Startup vs large company" feels like a false choice in many ways.

My experience with (2) larger companies, and confirmed from conversations with friends, is that while you tend to have more support, you are often placed on individual siloed teams where you stay for years. I think the key benefit of smaller companies is that you can work across so many different aspects of the application. Process also tends to be less burdensome so you are able to devote more of your time to the text editor writing business logic.

Still, my experience and my circle is limited so I suspect some might have had the opposite experience.

Someone told me they spend 2 years in a team responsible for some of the undo menu at a giant software company. Incredible siloing.

I was interviewing at a megacorp a long while back, my interviewer was solely responsible for the pie charts in some old application. He mentioned in the interview that it was totally feasible to run your own startup on the side.

That sounds like quite literally hell on earth. Thanks but no thanks (never mind the legal pandoras box of running your startup at your day job.)

My first job out of school was writing an OS from scratch for a new device. This was at a FAANG. Couldn't be happier. It depends on the opportunity.

An acquaintance of mine worked at Google for one entire year on the functionality of one single button in GMail (I don't recall what it was specifically). He was very disappointed, left and launched a startup.

To be fair, adding apparently simple undo functionality to a complex transactional system can be fiendishly difficult.

Engineering learnings at big cos vs startups are wildly different. If your goal is to learn what it takes to start your own company, you are much better off working at even a mid-sized startup, than a big tech co. There are a number of reasons for this, but a particularly consequential one is that you will learn to build/manage/deploy applications from 0, and if things go well, through a variety of scales thereafter. At a mid-size startup you'll have less of the "from 0" bit, but you are much more likely to learn to deal with the scaling issues that manifest as the software that was built in the early days starts degrade with growing load. You will also likely be using similar open source tools in both the early & middle startup stages.

Building features in a large, existing codebase, in the robust tooling context of a big company, is nothing like building services from the ground up.

Larger companies have great programs, but also have large company problems which in many ways often aren't IT problems.

What does that have to do with startups? My first job out of college was a very similar experience to yours yet the company was fairly large. (~2,000 employees) By the time I left I was the lead developer of one of the many projects I worked on during those years.

I think a larger company is probably more likely to have an established mentorship program in place for he engineers rather than a startup.

I also needed to take three months of disability and I received 100% of my pay during those three months (and even kept accruing PTO) because my established company provided me with short term (and long term) disability insurance.

> I came in as a junior engineer (feral would be an appropriate term)

How did this work? From what I've seen, early stage startups always want senior only.

Start-ups hire "juniors" but they don't advertise the position as junior, you can identify these roles by virtue of them paying way under "market-rate". The downside is most companies (it seems Hipmunk was an exception) have little to no training for these "juniors" and you have to have a strong stomach for BS as you have to make do entirely by yourself. YMMV.

I've been in a junior start-up role twice very early in my career. It worked out for me, but I wouldn't really advise it in an era of Google/MS hiring massive amounts of fresh grads with high comp.

You can want seniors all you like but if your budget can't handle it you get juniors. This is how you end up with something that works bit doesn't scale well. By the time you need to scale you should be able to afford seniors.

I think the part about the budget was accurate but it might have also just been difficult to attract top talent without the name recognition.

I have my opinions which I will not share for why Hipmunk stagnated but I will say, it had nothing to do with scaling or technical obstacles.

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