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Ask HN: Would you rather work for Google or a smaller high growth company?

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Re: Ask HN: Would you rather work for Google or a smaller high growth company?

#51

Post by 6ak74rfy »

provlem wrote: post #4

I will share the suggestion shared by "Jack ma", the founder of alibaba group. He said, To become an entrepreneur "One should work for small companies, generally in big companies, you are part of the big machine, but in small companies, you do most of the work your self and learn it". So, it depends on what you want to be, if you plan to put your self in stable career without much of risk involved - go ahead with big…

> If you want to be part of next future companies, where you can learn much more about the process of how company works and other information, start with smaller high growth company.

I think this is only true when the startup is really small, say, 5-20 people. I was once part of a startup that had ~100 developers and I hardly learned about its inner workings, was rarely part of any decision-making on business or customer-facing use cases etc.

Re: Ask HN: Would you rather work for Google or a smaller high growth company?

#55

Post by provlem »

6ak74rfy wrote: post #51
provlem wrote: post #4

I will share the suggestion shared by "Jack ma", the founder of alibaba group. He said, To become an entrepreneur "One should work for small companies, generally in big companies, you are part of the big machine, but in small companies, you do most of the work your self and learn it". So, it depends on what you want to be, if you plan to put your self in stable career without much of risk involved - go ahead with big…

> If you want to be part of next future companies, where you can learn much more about the process of how company works and other information, start with smaller high growth company. I think this is only true when the startup is really small, say, 5-20 people. I was once part of a startup that had ~100 developers and I hardly learned about its inner workings, was rarely part of any decision-making on business or cust…

Not necessarily it has to be 5-20 people. it could be a team of 100-200 people too.

But "~100 developers" that you mentioned, can not be small or mid-tech companies, until half or more than half of the developers are useless.

100 developers in one company have potential to built the next billion dollar product and literally change the world.

As you can see, some one just mentioned, FB has 250 developers ( https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-work-at-Fa... ) and some people do have mentioned they have approx 700, 900, or ....

But, important factor is - they have only 25K employee (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...) across world. There are more than 80+ office of Facebook world wide (source: https://www.facebook.com/careers/locations/), so even if you distribute employee evenly on all places - you will have approx 300 employees - each location.

My point is, if you were working in a company where 100 developers are creating product, than you were either at wrong place or judging the company wrong - one of them has to be true based on my research and opinion.

I do not want to offend any one with my post, I am just pointing the fact based on my research, please leave a reply, If my research above is wrong or misleading.

Re: Ask HN: Would you rather work for Google or a smaller high growth company?

#56

Post by pmontra »

I'd go to a consulting company that builds custom software for customers. In this way I'll see many different projects in different industries. But don't go to a company that sends you to work on site for a customer and bury you there. Stay in the main office.

After some years of that, consider switching sides and find a company that builds its own products, whatever they are.

Re: Ask HN: Would you rather work for Google or a smaller high growth company?

#57

Post by borplk »

lmeyerov wrote: post #11

Counterintuitive to assumptions being made here... you can easily be more of a cog at a 50-5000 employee company than a 5,000+ person company. The medium companies generally have a single true line of business and are focused on tuning & turning that crank, turning $3M/yr to $10-100M/yr. Doing something else makes you a trouble maker, and budgets are watched. The bigger companies will have $100M-100B/yr revenue, so t…

I agree but keep in mind it's not that easy to choose to work on those interesting stuff at bigco. If they want you to oil the gears on a legacy application that's what you do. You have to either get lucky, go in specifically to work on those projects, or slowly fit yourself in those teams after doing boring stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Would you rather work for Google or a smaller high growth company?

#58

Post by BerislavLopac »

In my experience, the reality doesn't have much to do with the size of a company; what matters is the management. Of course companies of different sizes naturally have different management problems, but all of them can be (attempted to be) solved in a number of ways, and this depends on individuals in charge.

Re: Ask HN: Would you rather work for Google or a smaller high growth company?

#59

Post by solarkraft »

axaxs wrote: post #33
spraak wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened in the interview where you owed money? I've never heard of anything like that

I was given the hotel to stay at, and directions that I didn't need a rental car just to use a taxi or uber/lyft. In my city I've had bad experiences with Uber, so asked the hotel to arrange a taxi for my interview needs. It was a small SUV. The driver was nice, knew the company I was interviewing at, said he does these interviews all day, knew exactly where to go, was waved in by security and knew exactly where to d…

I thought taxi companies were "private driver service"s?

Thanks for naming the company.

Re: Ask HN: Would you rather work for Google or a smaller high growth company?

#60

Post by cemregr »

provlem wrote: post #55
6ak74rfy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to be part of next future companies, where you can learn much more about the process of how company works and other information, start with smaller high growth company. I think this is only true when the startup is really small, say, 5-20 people. I was once part of a startup that had ~100 developers and I hardly learned about its inner workings, was rarely part of any decision-making on business or cust…

Not necessarily it has to be 5-20 people. it could be a team of 100-200 people too. But "~100 developers" that you mentioned, can not be small or mid-tech companies, until half or more than half of the developers are useless. 100 developers in one company have potential to built the next billion dollar product and literally change the world. As you can see, some one just mentioned, FB has 250 developers ( https://www…

It's absolutely not true that FB currently has 250 engineers. There were over 700 in 2012. The company has multiplied in size many times over since then.

You linked to an answer with no source. Here's a revant post from the FB blog: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/ship-ear...

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