What’s it like working at a large tech company?

Now, $200k isn't bad. But the offer I accepted from the public tech company is for $420k the first year, and will likely go up from there, especially if the stock does well. It's not crazy to think I could be making $600k - 800k within a few years. And to be honest, I think it's on the low end for the big tech companies at my level. And it doesn't come with some crazy grind as far as I can tell. People seem to actually work 40 hours, the PTO policy is flexible and people take 20-25 days a year off, people work from home when they need to, the benefits are solid, etc.

After this experience and seeing the huge disparity in pay, I would never go work at some random startup unless I was founder level or deeply, deeply believed in their mission.

Check out https://levels.fyi ...from everything I've seen, it's pretty accurate. The numbers there for my company and level were almost $70k lower than what I ultimately accepted.

It varies greatly from company to company. At Google (where I work) yes. At Facebook no.

> What’s the pace like

I often work less than 40 hours a week and nobody even mentions it, but if I work more they tell me to work less.

> Is there really a lot of process that get in your way?

This depends entirely on what you want to do. Do you want to redesign GMail? Do you want to rewrite the codebase in Haskell? Do you want to move your data storage to mongo db? Then yes, there will be a lot of process in your way. Risky things like user facing changes and introducing new unsanctioned technologies will force you to go through a lot of bureaucracy.

But on the other hand if you just want to build and improve infrastructure using company sanctioned tools then there isn't that much process at all, just get a code reviewer and you are done. I haven't been blocked by process for years, I just decide I want to implement a feature, I write the code and send it and the feature is in an hour later.

> Are your peers generally competitive or supportive?

Peers evaluate each other so you don't see much toxic competition. However most of your peers will be relatively ambitious people so they will strive to look better than you, so you could say that they are competitive even though in this competition supporting peers looks good.

But it is not unreasonable, as you have to think of how much the large publicly traded tech companies pay for talent which is in the same level as a startup founder.

Also that work life balance seems decent. Are you worried that you will find enough of a challenge at the position?

It's an IC role, roughly equivalent to the upper band of L5 / E5 at Google or FB (though they might pay better).