jswiente

Sure, but job safety is another issue. The argument in question was that you have a more stable environment in a large company regarding the topics you are working on. In my opinion, this isn't the case. Think of the engineers working on Google Wave or discontinued Sun technologies.

"You will have stability. If you are hired by Oracle or Google [...] chances are you'll be able to work on this specific problem for long enough to accomplish something."

Large companies change all the time. Departments are merged, strategies are changed and projects are stopped constantly. I think this point isn't valid.

It depends on the level of abstraction and the view of the system that should be described. A model of the structure of a system with components, subcomponents and their relationship with each other does not include any information about the actual implementation of the components and the programming paradigm being used. Also, a data model of the business domain is not concerned with any technical detail such as the components or subcomponents the system. You can model all these artifacts using UML.

Of course, using an UML class diagram for a detailed design describing the implementation of a component does not make sense when using functional programming.

+1 for Frankfurt.

Yep, I'm in for a meetup in the Rhein/Main area, preferably Frankfurt.

What I've read lately is that you can sit basically in any position as long as you change it frequently.

I would argue that experience in a corporate environment is often overrated, especially when working on a long-term project that lasts several years using the same programming language and frameworks. Sure, you're ending up knowing all the nuts and bolts of the system, but you haven't gained much experience with a broad range of different technologies.