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

These things are consistent with my experience at a small company. I'd also add that it's much harder to keep things from becoming personal than it is at a large company.

I agree it isn't for everyone. I have 2 kids and a mortgage and I left a high paying contracting job to take less money at a startup.

I took the chance and I went from dreading work, to really enjoying it. It proves that money doesn't always buy you happiness.

This is so subjective - everyone's experience is different. While I agree that large companies have a tendency to accumulate overhead and slackers things have changed significantly over the last few years.

I started out working at several startups and they were orders of magnitude worse in terms of politics and personality clashes. Also, it was hard attracting qualified engineers. On the flipside, it was very clear what my contribution was and I felt very responsible for the success and failure of the company.

I've been at HP for 11 years now and it's changed from somewhat bloated to very lean. We've had pretty thorough housecleaning efforts in recent history as have most mega companies. Bureaucracy has never been a problem where I've been (I'm sure it's different in other divisions), the smaller project teams feel a lot like working at startups with the added benefit of very good equipment, etc.

I agree with a lot of the sentiment in this blog. There are however exceptions. Some small companies get some guy in charge who was previously mired in the bureaucracy somewhere and starts trying to impose that on the little company. Disaster ensues.

On the other end, you can get a good startup feel by finding a good team in a big company/institution (usually you see this in Academia, but some places in companies have this too). A well built group will have some admin staff (secretaries, hands off project managers, etc.) to insulate the core team from the crazy. When done well, this admin group will fill out the crap forms, hide various money absurdities, deflect outside poisoners and otherwise do amazing things to keep the non-admin folks blissfully ignorant.[1] The bosses in such a group will create or emulate a flat reporting structure, and not let the external politics apply too much pressure or influence to the team. The core team will then get to do their thing in a way that feels very much like a small company or startup.

There are benefits and drawbacks to this of course. Benefits include having a giant name behind you, and the awesome funding and legal resources available -- I was once told "you think you need a cluster... we can buy one, just make sure first". Awesome. Customers say "Oh $BIG_NAME no need to jump you through these sill hoops to prove yourself". And of course, the feeling of stability provided by being in the employ of a giant. On the drawback side: you do more work than a lot of your peers outside the group -- not a big deal but sometimes mentally taxing. Politics can creep in, so you need to maintain high productivity and always do a good job, so the bosses can preserve the group by selling it as "ninja rockstar team alpha" to everyone else. And no matter how good the shielding, sometimes the crazy still can creep in.

So basically, this is a long winded way of saying: if you are careful, you may be able to find the startup feel in a big company, or at least the good parts of it.

[1] I'm fully convinced that good admin staff are worth the same as good programmers in this type of situation. In my current employment I travel a lot, but have never filled out an expense report, I dump some receipts with the admin, answer a few questions, and she takes care of the rest of the voodoo. Similarly with the HR rep for insurance we have. Purchases are a simple "hey I need, can you charge it to...". I know there are forms and procedures -- I've heard horror stories. When we need a new person we tend to churn a bit til we find a good one, then it's a quick raise and lots of flattery to keep him/her around. (On a personal side it's always good to be very nice and friendly to these folks, they do magic :) ).

I've worked at both, and said the exact same thing.

Now I find myself at a big company (Netflix). How did this happen?

When I was looking for a job, I was mostly looking at startups, but the Netflix job caught my eye, because they are solving a very interesting technology problem.

I brought up my concerns in the interview, and they convinced me by pointing out that a lot of people here had come from big tech companies that had transitioned from startup to big and corporate (two of those being Yahoo and eBay), and most of those people wanted to avoid that.

So a lot of what is done here is done as a way to retain top talent -- engineers are respected, process is a dirty word. That's really important. When something goes wrong, the response is not "what rules can we put in place to prevent this". The response is "how can we educate new employees so they have to knowledge to make sure this doesn't happen again, and how can we give them to tools to make this easier?"

That is why I chose to work for a big company again.

Also, it was pointed out to me that if you look at most people in the silicon valley, they didn't make their money working for startups -- they made it working for bigger but growing public companies like Yahoo and eBay and now Google and Netflix.