After working at a startup, I'll never work at a big company again

While I agree with the author on many parts, I do think he misses the ball on some issues.

For example, there seems to be an argument being made that a lot of the structure in big companies, as compared to start-ups, is to keep "lesser" people from making mistakes. But, I think that is far from reality.

If you're a startup, you have no employees, no sales and no users. No users means no support to give, no need to check if your latest changes fail on some obscure configurations, no infrastructure to handle the load, no critical bug-fixing of now outdated versions, etc, no fear to make significant changes and break things. No employees means no human resource handling, simpler paycheck administration, less managerial overhead. No sales means less administration, less regulatory burden, no internationalization issues, less need for documentation, and so on.

There's a different kind of company needed to innovate compared to the kind of company needed to sell a product worldwide in a competitive market with low margins.

There's only a few companies that handle can both at the same time. (Bigger ones buying up small ones don't count)

That being said, a small company where the product is in flux generally requires the engineers to have broader skillsets and tends to allow them to make more wide-ranging design choices. That just doesn't happen at bigger companies or with established products. You spend most of your time maintaining things.

For me, I have come to this realization after making a move to a large company (Motorola Mobility) from a small one. I have been working for them for two months, and I am already hating it. Being placed in China puts a whole additional layer on top of the typical bureaucracy you see in these large companies. Tons of red tape everywhere!

Needless to say, my experience is very much the same. I see lots of unnecessary office politics, the inability to get anything done at breakneck speed as you would at a startup, and for the most part total lack of innovation. It is really disheartening, and as the OP put it, makes you go home at the end of the day very disheartened.

After working for a startup, I'll never work for another one unless I own at LEAST 50% of it.

I've worked for large corporations and startups and definitely prefer startups.

Large corps are so mired in useless, mindless institutional procedures that you waste inordinate time satisfying the procedure beast, usually in areas that have nothing to do with your job (fun fact, I once worked as an analyst for a large corp and spent on average 4 hours a week taking industrial safety courses, volatile materials storage compliance training, etc.. The chances of me ever doing anything in the company in a warehouse, assembly plant, or anything other than look at a computer on a desk in an office park were 0). Sure there's some politics at the upper levels of a given organizational unit in a large company, but the pay tends to be pretty good and you'll have pretty good job security. IMHO large corps are great places to work when you are just starting out because your mistakes generally will just average out with everybody else.

Small companies/startups are such an entirely different beast it's night and day. You have huge impact in everything the company does. A single employee might account for 40% of the company revenue! The jobs are usually very versatile, you don't get stuck in a single task, you probably have to learn to do many different jobs -- you gain more experience than it looks like for a given unit of time compared to large co. For example, at large co, you might not be asked to work on contract negotiations until you've been there for 10 years. At startup you might do it from day one.

While large co's problems are mostly procedure issues, Startups are not without their issues -- and they're usually personnel problems:

1) Politics are magnified beyond belief. In large co, if my division manager was having a problem with another division manager, I might not even know. In a startup, it's like watching your parents fight over a family dinner.

2) Because everybody can have such a huge impact, screwups are magnified. A bad employee can literally sink a company. In a two person startup, that's 50% of the workforce.

3) There's very few checks against bad employees. One of the reasons large co has so many mindless procedures is to help control for bad employees. Startups don't really have a way to do that.

4) Job stability? Pffff...what's that? Pay is often not as good as large co, and benefits such as options or shares are just paper until you can buy beer with them.

I was once recruited to work at a very well funded startup that fell apart during salary negotiations. They wanted to make up for the low salary with catered meals and an all-you-can-eat pantry, dry cleaning and other benefits plus some options. I told them I'd rather trade those benefits for a pay check and would sign an agreement to never touch those benefits -- which wouldn't be hard since my position would require me to almost never actually be in the office where those benefits were offered. They backed out and it demonstrating to me that those benefits were simply flash and not worth the delta in salary they'd have to pay me.

There are many benefits to working at a large company over a startup. Many of the items in this thread alone are proof to that. If you have a mortgage, and 2 kids in college then working for a startup that could fold tomorrow is not exactly the safest bet.

In addition, working at breakneck speed and being completely accountable for failure is just not within every programmer's capacity. Some need more structure to be successful. Not everyone is a rock star programmer.

That being said the software industry is changing rapidly. Being a rockstar makes you more valuable as time goes on. Large s/w companies are having trouble even maintaining marginal talents and the workforce of programmers is dwindling. Us hackers will continue to be more valuable than ever.