Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?

Or meetings, meetings, and... more meetings!

My 2 cents:

As a contractor, charge a lot. They either have budget and want to spend it RIGHT NOW or they don't. The manager engaging you doesn't really care about your daily rate (relatively speaking).

Above comments on automation is spot on. Test suites might be terrible, so the care required to make changes without breaking things is your responsibility, hence the slow pace. What is in your control is the ability to automate your own testing.

Integration with poorly defined APIs is an important skill. You generally won't have another team maintaining and improving a nice API. You will have access to obscure data stores dumped untransformed in the data warehouse from another megacorp's expensive and poorly documented product, possibly with myriad ETL nuances (read: bugs). Learn to work with this and you can extract gold.

If you have a Windows SOE system, embrace Cygwin/similar.

Why would I find it depressing if I’m risk averse? You sound like the only risk is getting fired for a random reason, which could also happen at a smaller corp.

Here is my list.

* Things work a lot more slowly in big co's.

* There's a lot more ego involved so prepare for a lot of ass lickers(I really can't think of a better term).

* A lot of "meetings", "discussions", "planning" and so on, which often are just means to kick a can down the road.

* More time to relax.

* Nearly impossible to change the status quo, not impossible but a very slow and painful process.

* Often more freedom to experiment with technologies and proprietary solutions if you find a way to justify them(which is often not a difficult task).

* Plenty of ways to squeeze out training, seminars, certifications and whatnot, just make sure you read the tiny font at the bottom.

> At a startup you are actively changing the world.

That sounds very exciting. Can you point to one startup that's changing the world?

> All I’ve ever learnt over the last decade has been by > operating in a capital constrained environment.

Even in big companies you will be constrained by budgets, and possibly even more than you're used to. The big companies have money to try many different things, but normally products start small, and can be killed if they're not going to be profitable enough. Especially if you're ina leadership position, you're going to have to convince people to fund your products.

The other big thing to consider is politics. Don't get me wrong, politics are everywhere, even in startups, but there's a difference. You're going to have arguments with people that you can't go have a beer with after work, and you have to consider how that will affect your relationship after the argument.