Big Company vs. Startup Work and Compensation

It's important to differentiate skills learned at big companies. Some are very useful, but others are coping mechanisms that have no place in a startup. Meanwhile, the scrappiness and well-rounded skill set learned at a startup will almost always have a place in larger businesses.

My own personal recommendation for early career workers would be to prefer the cream-of-the-crop mid and large companies where you'll get useful experience you can't find anywhere else, then prefer startups and leave the slower-moving and more dysfunctional larger companies as a last resort.

What I usually tell new grads is: Get offers from both, and take the job that has the best potential person or people that you'll be able to learn from. There are a bunch of ways you can research this. Try asking people on the team to tell you who they've learned the most from in their career.

Do not take a job where you'll be a lone wolf. As a new grad your goal should be to find great people to work with and learn from them.

If you want to have a balanced career you should try both big corps and startups, but ordering doesn't matter.

All I can say is that the market is actually a lot more efficient than most people give it credit for. I remember coming out of school and thinking "Why would anyone work for a big company when the payouts for startups are so much better?" After a bunch of experience, I've found that:

1. Those big startup payouts are much rarer than a typical new grad conceives. They're also more widely distributed: perception is that startups are "go big or go home", but a number of companies end in talent acquisitions that are just slightly less or more than what the founders would've earned at a big company.

2. Compensation at big companies varies wildly, and people with the effort & effectiveness levels that you'd expect from a startup often are actually making startup-level money. There is zero reason for anyone doing this to publicize that fact, and oftentimes they're contractually forbidden from disclosing it.

For people trying to decide between these - forget about the financial rewards and ask yourself "What would you like your working life to be like?" I'd also forget the common wisdom about startups = no life & big companies = drudging pace; both of these are inaccurate on a micro-level, and you can find startups that prioritize work-life balance or teams within a big company where everyone's life revolves around work.

Instead, think about the problems you would like to solve. Do you want to do cutting edge research that pushes humanity's knowledge forwards? Work for a research lab or big company's research department. Do you want to bring new technologies to the masses? Then you want a startup, probably one that has spun out of a major university with a couple professors as founders. Do you want to put social hacks in motion and bring technology to ordinary lives? That's probably also a startup, probably one with young founders. Do you want to scale technologies and work with big data or machine learning? Big company; startups usually lack ownership of enough data, unless they're a consultancy. Do you want to apply technology to an industry that currently does things backwardly? Join a startup whose founders have significant domain knowledge in that industry.

If you work on problems that you believe in, you'll find that you're much more effective at solving them. The financial rewards follow after that; money is a lagging indicator for value generated, not a leading one.

Also, while "rand(100)" might be an accurate characterization of the returns of all employees over all startups, it is not entirely a game of chance. There is skill involved in picking the right startup to join: being proactive in your search, building a personal network, finding founders with track records, considering enterprise startups. You can learn to improve your odds -- a bit like learning to count cards.