Top differences between working for startups and corporations | Hacker News Reader

Top differences between working for startups and corporations

blog.startupcvs.com

23 pointsMengue21 comments

I always trust sites dedicated to getting people jobs at startups to tell the honest truth about what it's like to work at a startup.

I work for a large corporation, and almost every single negative thing listed here is false. The main one that's not (and I'm not sure this is even really a negative) is the high risk/low upside - I'll be quite comfortable here, but I'll never be pulling down millions in a year as I would if I struck it rich with a startup I owned. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure only a few dozen people actually make millions from startups.

Oh, and "essential vs. substitutable" - everyone is substitutable. It doesn't matter if you're employee #2 or employee #10002, you're replaceable. Actually, that one amusingly contradicts the generalist vs specialist one - you would think specialists that know the domain would be a lot harder to replace than the "generalist" who's spinning up the world's 8 billionth MEAN stack, but then that would require the source to have a little self-awareness.

This. Although, in my experience it's more relative to team size than company size. I work on a fairly small engineering team within a large apparel company and it seems to match the bullet points for start-ups more closely.

One important point is that because large corporations often try to emulate the culture of startups (and never the other way around), if you try to make an article contrasting the two cultures you are inevitably going to miss the mark on your description of large corporations. Essentially you are trying to describe a divergence when much of the world is seeking a convergence between the two.

Thanks a lot for your comment.

Having worked for both, large corporations (Google, GE, BCG) as well as startups between 3 and 300 employees, we are purely speaking from our own experiences (as mentioned on the bottom of the article).

I've found startup life to be less initiative-based than my previous corporate life.

In B2B startup, features are driven by sales and post-sale support, and sales / keeping the biggest customers happy (for later upsell) is of paramount importance. We have far more potential features to build than we have people to work on them, so prioritization is done from the top down and can change depending on the sales landscape. Thus I have very little discretion over what I do on a day to day basis, and there are people asking me to do things every day. Initiative isn't actually necessary, unless you want to improve things in ways that management etc. can't see.

Whereas in corporate life, I owned a little corner of the product, and when given a strategic initiative, I came up with feature suggestions that made our customers' and my team's life / lives easier. I had more strategic responsibility, and although the direct risk of my failure was lower, my work had larger impact because it got delivered to far more people - a mature organization has far more customers, if it's healthy.

Blimey, that was hard to read. Also a couple of points were only relevant to the USA.

I actually thought it looked pretty good. If it wasn't done by a designer, I didn't notice it (probably my barrier is too low :) ).

So sorry, we have no designers and had to improvise :D

Agree with "brand recognition" - its a serious advantage for employees of large corp. Large corps are vulnerable to losing top talent because they usually can't match market due to strict internal hierarchy policies. Quicker way to get promoted at large corp - prove your skills, leave on good terms, gain visibility and titles elsewhere and then re-join large corp at a much higher position.

Regulations:

Large corps are much stricter regulated and this adds to your responsibilities to do boring stuff.

Permissions:

Large corps spending lots of resources for reinventing and improving systems of access controls and permissions as well as sets of exceptions to such systems.

Average worker age:

20+ something for startup, 40-50+ something for corps.

Accessibility of top management:

Startup: you knock the door and talk to the guy, Large corp: you send email to C*O of large corp and get no reply not because he is busy, but because his secretary pre-filtered emails and discarded yours.

"Quicker way to get promoted at large corp - prove your skills, leave on good terms, gain visibility and titles elsewhere and then re-join large corp at a much higher position."

That one irks me no end, but it's in my experience true. Also, in smaller companies, "title inflation" is a thing, I've seen companies you can get named whichever job title you prefer in exchange for a lower or no raise in salary.

And afterwards, said employees spin their "inflated" job title into a better job at large corp. (which they usually are qualified to do, but they have a leg vs equally qualified internal employees with a lesser title).

Edit: my experience applies mainly to NON software large corps., which have less ways to gauge the skill levels of internal employees in IT. Also applies to the government sector (same as credentials and certifications).

you didn't work for a competitive software corp. did you? to me, all three are wrong.

-Regulations? if you are good, you can do anything you want. you are powerful. regulations are there to stop dreamers. dreamers are stopped in startup world a lot harsher. -Permissions? only around %2 of employees work on that. actually less. do you think those kind of systems are worth the effort? (works! done.) -Avg worker age? this is simply not true. the acquihires we had, were older than my -corp- team avg.

I worked at both, but there are perhaps exceptions.

Me too, but corp culture perhaps changes as fast as software development practices change.

Thanks a lot for the additional points.

Corporations: People who find pleasure in their personal lifes

Startups: People who don't

If you don't have friends, just work hard and be good at something at the very least. Even if its annoying people for a living (I am looking at you, Tech-Recruiters!)

I've worked for 2 corporations - each time I ended up tired, burnt out and devoid of any social life.

They delivered a lot of perks - money, sport pass, private health care - but in exchange created a very stressful workplace filled with meetings, performance reviews and many people who didn't bother to help when I struggled with some part of project I was not familiar with. I've gained 20kg in a year, was nearly depressed and hated myself for working there. I hated how with all buzzwords and bullshit smiled managers made me fill guilty that I don't sit there more than 8h a day and that I were slower than people who had 12 times (literally!) more experience than I did.

Now I work remotely for startup on B2B. My wage is bit lower, I have no medical and sport perk but finally I have enough sleep and enough time to take care of myself. I often go out and meet my friends as often as I can. I am finally rested enough to workout and I feel my life improve each day.

Whether corporate life makes one shine or feel miserable is a matter of particular company, manager, team, stack and several other factors. Some people are truly happy for being there, some, like me and most of my friends, promise themselves to never ever work there again.

I sense the same thing. I always see HN types bragging about their long hours, or how dedicated they are to their startup. I suspect a lot of these people don't have hobbies outside of work.

I think your job is to some extent what you make of it. While it is true that work is handed down to you, it is possible to create your own work, and in a lot of cases (in my exp) it shows favorably on you as an employee. Plus its more fun to get paid to do what you want while having to do what you are told.

I find that in many of the companies I've worked for (non-startups), I end up getting the startup boxes while being paid and appreciated at the corporation level. In my case, and likely for many others, staying in corporations is a waste of talent and drive (and world benefit).

good read

Thanks a lot!

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