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>I could be a cog in a giant corporate machine, or I can have a measurable impact where I work.

I think that point can support working for either a big company or a small company depending on what type of impact you are looking for.

I've worked for startups in the past and have had a huge impact on the startup but almost no impact on the outside world because the startups just weren't tackling very visible problems.

Now I work for Google and I have basically zero impact on Google i.e. basically nothing that I can do will ever move the dial in terms of Google's revenue, etc. But I've worked on several projects that have had a big impact outside of Google. For example, I was on a small team (3 people) that developed the Python 2.7 runtime for App Engine (this was a while ago) and I was on another small team that implemented the server-side infrastructure for the Google Home. I also developed the screensaver for Chromecast - which is a tiny tiny project - but still millions of people love it.

Screensaver in chromecast is awesome!!!

I love the screensaver for Chromecast, thanks for that.

The chromecast screensaver is the background on the TV in my Airbnb. Multiple guests have told me how much that screensaver makes them feel at home when they travel, and makes the world a little less strange.

Fun fact: those screensaver photos are taken by Google employees!

Can't find a source for that, but have many times corroborated that through a Google search. Peter Norvig is one of them.

I'm unsure which screensaver photos we're talking about--but if it's the nature photography (and others that you can choose from) which play when nothing is casting to Chromecast, then I have at least one instance where I have seen photos by a person I know is a photographer and not a Google employee (Trey Ratcliff).

I agree with this mentality. I was at a FAANG company as well, and some of the projects I worked on had a small impact on the company but a huge impact on a certain group. 4% of a billion users is the total population of Canada.

Now that I'm at a startup, I'm making a huge impact on the startup, but it's having very little impact on the outside world and the industry. I guess the hope is that one day the startup will have impact on the world, but very few ever do.

It's an interesting choice.

Which do you prefer?

I'd prefer having an impact on the company versus an impact on a large number of users, because I would experience the impact on the company every day, but at the big company, the feeling of satisfaction from running into random people who have used what I made would still be somewhat infrequent.

> ..but at the big company, the feeling of satisfaction from running into random people who have used what I made would still be somewhat infrequent.

Online forums, discussion groups etc. can makes them very frequent, global, profound and in many cases very visible to your friends & families - who otherwise would not know what you are working at the small startup.

> I think that point can support working for either a big company or a small company depending on what type of impact you are looking for.

For a lot of people, "I want to have an impact where I work" is more about their own ego and sense of importance than about impact on other people's lives. This is not a value judgment, by the way - wanting to feel like more than just another faceless disposable drone is a valid desire.

Avoiding the alienation of labor, as Marx might put it.

I'd argue that people conflate "having an impact" with "creating a product" rather than "having an impact" with having visible prestige. I used to think the former, but not after having experience interacting with people who want to be middle managers of middle managers. Those people want power and mostly don't care about impacting anything outside revenue increases that can be easily tied back to their name.

Apologies, but I don't quite see what this has to do with the point I was making.

I would suggest that you've had experiences with bad middle managers. I say this all the time, but I only began to appreciate middle management when I became a front-line manager. An effective middle manager makes a whole boat full of people feel secure and strategically focused. They figure out how to leverage the strengths of their front-line managers and senior-level ICs, and how to fill in gaps. They know how to manage upward towards the executive layer, to acquire resources and summarize a great deal of complexity.

It's a more salient feeling. I worked at a school for a while, and you can have deep impact on a handful of lives. It doesn't scale, but you can really feel the effect.

On the other hand, if I submit a patch to Chrome that makes it 0.00001% faster, it's a much bigger impact -- millions of hours saved -- but it's an impact you can only see in aggregate statistics. No individual will even notice the effect, so it's much harder to see or feel. It's more abstract. You have to be pretty analytical to get the same level of satisfaction, even if you've done more to benefit people overall.

It's a lot of fun until the company gets acquired and you get $80k for your 4 years of hard work, and the founders get $50M.

Source: happened to me with a YC startup.

80k is a lot of money, but this must suck, especially if you feel like you were an integral part of the company's succcess - some German researchers found that compensation perception is more on "fairness" than the actual numbers, if you'd made 80k and the founders 200k, maybe you'd have been OK with it.

I know research is good, but you really don't need research to figure that out. You don't want to feel screwed over

> Main reason: it's more fun.

Agreed, although things can get much less fun once you end up burned out.

I think this Tweet does a decent job at describing the tradeoffs/challenges:

    > Typical designer mid-career crisis.
    > 
    > * You want to stay hands on
    > * You want a relaxed, low stress environment doing “meaningful work”
    > * You want to maximise your earning potential
    > 
    > The majority of roles you see force you to pick just two.

Source: https://twitter.com/andybudd/status/1204458288118714370

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Minor digression: now, not all startups are completely hectic, option-fueled sweatshops. I'm talking about the default picture that comes to my mind when I hear this word. The most successful small startups I know are quite the opposite in fact. Well, I guess having an actual market, solving a real problem is important. (OK, "scale-ups" are the f*cking worst still as you end up with chaos and inability to get work done).

> it's more fun

I recommend everyone spend some part of their career in a 1 to 20-person shop, a 20 to 200-person shop and a 2,000+ person shop. (I don’t have experience in 200 to 2,000.) They are vastly different work environments.

I thought I was a 1 to 20 guy; I’m not. I want enough structure to let me specialise without letting bureaucracy get in the way. Twenty to ~two hundred.

Start-ups are fun, but they’re also stressful. If you get unlucky, they can also leave you materially less wealthy than you could have been with more stability.

I'm not sure you can say the startup impact is measurable either. You certainly can't measure it by monetary value.

Mindlessly building what is handed to you is a culture problem and not a company size problem. Some startups have less freedom than some corporations but both usually grant more freedom to more senior people.

You can still 'wear many hats' at some mega corps too, if the company only has 'engineer' as a title then you are expected to basically do 'everything' . The team you are on will decide what the balance is though.

I think all of what you said could apply to both sizes of the companies.

Both of these comments make good points, but are two ends of a false dichotomy. Not every startup is going to have horrible work/life balance, and not every job at a big company is going to be boring and soul crushing. And there are all sorts of jobs in the middle and to the side of this spectrum.

I'd even say it's more specific to the individual and not just the job. I have a boring, soul crushing job, but to someone else it might be their dream.

Everything you're talking about is really just small companies, not startups at all.

Go to work for an established, profitable, small company. Make a good salary and have a fulfilling career.

>If you're the sort of person people will come to for help with whatever comes up (and enjoy being that), start-ups can be great

That's kind of odd from my perspective, because that's exactly my niche, and yet, my very first job was at a startup (of about 3 people besides me), where I was a rapidly jettisoned cog, and every since I've gone to progressively bigger and more bureaucratic organizations while seeking, I guess, less definition of my role.

Been at 2 series A/B startups for the past ~3.5 years. It was a really fun 3-6 months followed by 3 very not fun years.

My N is low, they were both non-Bay (NYC) startups, maybe some startups are fun, maybe I'm really bad at picking startups, but I think a startup's culture is often as much or more of a crapshoot than the startup's business.

Was at Google before, and it was fun for only a bit as well, but definitely not as actively non-fun as my last 3 years has been.