Big Companies vs. Startups (2015)

IMO, startups rarely have a process issue. They have a management issue. Process is bureaucracy. It adds no value but it helps to minimize the harms of over hiring which is something all big companies do in their quest for job creation.

I think it all depends on your manager, obviously. I’ve had good managers and mentors at startups. I wouldn’t have done it any other way.

100% agree, and this isn’t specific to IT. Whether you want to open a grocery store or an automobile garage or an investment fund, starting your career with 5 or more years working for the big boys is really important. There are a lot of problems these big orgs have “solved”, a lot of knowledge to be acquired

i think this depends. for most people, i would agree. but for people who were destined to be great founders, it's a terrible idea because working for big companies will inevitably condition you to do things a certain way. if you're someone who is smart enough and truly destined to be a great founder, starting from a blank slate and finding your own unique way of doing things is how we create new processes and systems and ideas that has never been done before. i don't think mark zuckerberg would have benefitted from working for big tech before starting fb.

Hmm, I’d recommend the opposite. I don’t think you’ll ever full recover if you start your career at a large company and start to believe that that kind of dysfunction is normal.

Startups have issues too, but they’re more often related to the technical parts, which you can actually do something with and learn from early in your career.

If you go to the large company what you learn is navigating their particular brand of process.

I think you should be given the opportunity to try both, even better before you finish your studies (if that's the case).

I'd recommend starting at a company of 30-50. It's large enough so some processes are already there, yet small enough that your actions have impact, and you have influence on the processes. Software companies at this size have a pressure to grow, so you'll be there when processes are defined. There are specialists for some things you don't need to care about, but you meet them, and can talk to them about their roles and learn about them as well.

> For most junior folks I meet, I recommend starting their career at a big company rather than a startup.

Yes, absolutely this. I'm surprised to see recommendations to do a startup as a first job. That's not a good idea.

A new grad who has never worked anywhere might know how to code quite well academically but they have zero exposure to how to build a commercial product. Semester-long projects at school can't teach that. That's how you end up with codebases without source control, no code reviews, no architecture, tons of security problems and so on.

Go work a few stints at large respected companies (in whatever field you are in). Absorb everything you can about how and why they do things. Understand the processes and why they exist. There's a reason for everything.

Then go do startups. You'll know how mature products are engineered, and you'll understand which parts of the processes make sense for a startup (not much, but you'll know) and you'll know how and when to slowly start introducing more maturity as the startup grows.

By now in my career I've worked at every size company, from 100K+ people multinationals to 3 person startups and just about every size and maturity point in between. I would never hire a zero-experience person to a tiny startup, that makes no sense. It would be bad for them and bad for the startup.

Note that those aren't the only two options. There are established companies that are small and have no intention of growing. Those are some of the best places to work.

Couldn’t agree more. I’ve done loads lot interesting work at startups, but never had the time to formalize and publish it.

In happy to do maintenance tasks at a startup for an application I built with care. It’s my baby and I want to take care of it.

Drastically missed this point when I thought I’d be able to make a huge impact at a small startup.

Relative, maybe true. But now I work at a pretty big company after multiple startups, and if I improve any key metric by like 1% it’s a massive, massive impact financially (and selfishly sounds way better as an anecdote on my resume).

Have enjoyed both worlds for what they are, but I definitely didn’t understand this when I was earlier in my career.

Average salaries have risen meteorically in the past 10 years though. Now instead of €45k per year you can expect to earn €90k!

You'd think, but this is actually no longer true since the pandemic. Most startups are remote-friendly, but being remote removes a lot of the networking opportunities that used to be part of the startup experience.

I feel like being an fte at a startup is an even worse proposition than before.

I've seen just as many layoffs at big tech because someone randomly decided X*0.9 was the proper number of employees as I've seen from startup volatility. The equity is better in big tech though.

As SRE who deals with a ton of .Net, many companies are moving to .Net Core on Linux. It's slow process but it's getting there.

The older I get, I realise that the most joyful accomplishments are in building something reliable that is also useful to a lot of people.

The tools/stack used to achieve this matters, but only so much.

No, even in 2024. I'm in New Zealand; there are a handful of big tech companies here, and they all offer compensation approximately the same (maybe on the upper end) as other New Zealand tech companies. There aren't that many remote jobs for US companies, and often they're also trying to save money by offshoring.

Why don't the local NZ tech companies offer more, though? Mostly because they don't have the same scale, so the revenue per employee is much lower.

FAANG (as in, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) make something like $1.5-$3 million USD per (white collar) employee (excluding Amazon warehouse workers).

Compare this to some well-known NZ tech companies (some of which even operate internationally!) Xero has revenue per employee of ~$150k USD. Pushpay maybe $200k USD revenue per employee. Datacom has revenue per employee of ~$130k USD.

It would bankrupt these companies to offer anything like what FAANG can offer, because they simply don't have the scale and revenue per employee to do so. Tech companies specifically have the rare ability to hugely leverage relatively few employees into huge revenue due to scaling, but only if you actually manage to scale. Most tech companies (probably even ones in the USA) don't have the kind of global scale and presence of the big tech companies.

You're just wrong, at least w.r.t. Google. Folks who are good and destined for senior in 4 years do not wait for a good manager/team/project - they seek them out and take their career into their own hands.