throwaway230315

The autonomy part you mentioned is something that I forgot about, but that's definitely a very important point as well: from what I've known, there is a huge limit on what you're allowed to do in a bigger environment. There are a risk of learning things that you might not like -- of course, I've never worked in one, so takes it with a cup of salt.

Personally for me, the other thing is that I like to learn a lot of things, and I just figure that whether now or a few years from now (when I'm "Senior Developer"), there would be just as much things to learn about. I figure it's just better to learn how to learn and get people to teach you stuffs without being in the same work place.

Another thing is that leadership skill is different than tech skill, which is also different than "technical leadership" skill, and this is back to the whole autonomy thing: I got a chance to try my ability to cram the idea that "not everything in a language need to be used" to the js guy, or telling the Java guy "may be we will just decide to rewrite our ORM with another library and putting up 5 layer of abstractions could potentially help us do that" is not a sound idea. Engineering skill set seems to be distinct from coding skill, which I'm not sure will qualify in the usual sense of "technical skill" or not, since you can't put "good variable and function naming" on your CV. Believe it or not, working with really bad code forced me to come back to first principle and ask question like "why should we use function", which I don't think you will have the chance to do in a bigger code base?

There are also benefits from working closer to the business: you learn what actually is important, and what is crap.

Of course, all of this would apply if you join another startup ... and I don't mean for any of this to be an advice or anything, more of a commiserating comment.

I can't really put my email here. But since you and some others are on their main account, do you mind if I have a way to contact you? I just want to follow up a few months from now to see your decisions.

I'm in the same situation, and to be honest, I'm not really sure.

First thing first, for all practical purposes, startup stock is useless -- and especially if you're already thinking of quitting.

In my situation, I joined the startup right after college, and it has been almost 2 years for me as well. I was the first technical employee, and except one other employee (the second hire), I'm not seeing other people better than me joining either. That said, there are a few things to keep in mind:

- Startup is NOT the place to be learning technical skill, especially early stage startup. The big 4 will serve you much better than that (and I know this going in). However, one of the things I've learned over the last year is that there are more to it than just technical skill. I have no doubt that I haven't been learning anywhere as fast as I could have in term of tech skill, but I've learned other stuffs that might just be as valuable: from dealing with (less than ideal) team member, dealing with expectation (mine and others), being resilient, and a gazillion things that probably make me a better human. Startup is emotional, for better or worse.

- I remember reading a quote that if you can only learn from people better than you, it's gonna be awfully hard to learn anything. As you eventually get better, you will have to learn from everyone around you.

- Since both of the previous points are extremely personal and subjective, I think that the one most important point to consider would be this: do you think the startup have any fighting chance? If the startup grows, both of those previous problems will fix itself. If the startup have no chance, well why would you stay there anyway? In my case, I can't answer that question with either a straight yes or no, so I can't decide.