Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 95 posts

Re: Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

#31

Post by rsfayez »

ireadfaces wrote: post #9

I don't think you are missing anything here. Both work in different ways (I have worked with companies as large as 250k+ employees to 2 employees). Both try to achieve different things (make something from zero, and create drastic value, v/s incremental changes and building and sustaining existing revenue streams) As an engineer: in bigger company, you will learn how large scale projects are pulled with so many peopl…

Agreed! I was in a large company for my entire career and only recently pivoted to a startup. I am enjoying learning about different types of challenges and how to go about solving them in a different environment. You end up learning so much about your professional self when you have to stretch your skills to apply to different situations.

Re: Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

#32

Post by baybal2 »

I worked in a startup for my 2nd serious job in Canada, and it was a mess.

The company burned through $7 mills, and went under in under a year. Such a mess. I will never ever work for a startup again.

If I owned that company, I would've already recouped the money many times over.

Re: Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

#33

Post by mywacaday »

I think you are being too hard on yourself and suffering a bit of faraway fields are greener. My post college employment from went from companies of size 10-35-3000-50000-60000. I'm the kind of the opposite of you in that I want to go back to a smaller company. If you are going to do it do it now but beware of getting trapped financially with no way to go back to living on a smaller income if you wanted to.

Re: Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

#35

Post by sasawpg »

legitster wrote: post #20

I'll go against the grain and say that working in startups has been hugely overrated. Each time I worked way harder for less money, and dealing directly with the owner/ceo makes everything so much more complicated. At a bigger company, sure it can be a bureaucratic mess - but I have been much personally happier every time. I get more resources, better pay, and much better work/life balance. I didn't realize how unhap…

That last sentence speaks volumes - it all depends on your personality and situation. Currently I have no appetite for the startup risk and no time/desire to work myself to death on a daily basis just to see a startup succeed (or more often, fail). Work-life balance is of far more importance to me right now than anything else, including compensation (especially when broken down to an hourly wage).

Re: Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

#36

Post by fatnoah »

I spent the first 17 years of my career at startups and am going on year 7 at big companies. I really think people should experience both. Startups offer the chance to actually experience and solve many of the same problems faced by big companies. This provides invaluable experience in understanding these problems from the ground up and the benefit of learning from doing, even if not building the optimal solution. At a startup, it's often possible to have a larger scope, giving a good big picture view of how everything works from "servers" to data to services to the front-end. You might even get a direct connect to customers and have to deal with org-level problems. Compensation is likely to be lower, but maybe comes with a lottery ticket.

When it comes to big companies, you'll have to deal with many of the same problems, but at a much larger scale and with many more stakeholders involved. Your big picture startup experience can help here (similarly, your big co experience can help you scale startups). Big companies can pay more and offer better benefits. At senior level especially, that pay difference can be significant.

Finally, regarding "the right way" to do things. At the few big companies I've been at, nothing is perfect and systems are so large that they've reached a level of complexity where few people have a solid end to end understanding of things. Rather than learning about how to build and scale systems, many people end up gaining very detailed knowledge about one particular aspect of such large systems.

Re: Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

#37

Post by eranation »

YMMV and really depends on the startup. I moved from a startup to a big company and back. My very personal experience was this - I learned more in 5 years at AWS than in my entire 20 years career. Then I moved to start my own company with 2 other amazing co-founders, I can say I learned more in 5 months at my own startup than anywhere else before. My experience from AWS definitely helped, but I think that the pace of learning and managing to "do more with less" (as much as frugality is a leadership principal at AWS, when you run your own seed stage startup, frugality gets a much more realistic meaning) - is orders of magnitude stronger at a startup.

If none of your startup peers or founders ever had any corporate experience - while it might be good (big corp didn't "ruin" them yet) it also might mean they will repeat mistakes or have to learn from scratch things that become common knowledge after a few years. How to run effective meetings, business writing, hiring practices, UX, scalable infrastructure and architecture. At AWS, there isn't a distributed systems concept that you can't just find someone who literally wrote the book on it and you can just ping them on slack.

So tl;dr - it all depends, I recommend diversifying your career, and just trying it out. I think that a mix of startups and big companies can only do good to your career.

Re: Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

#38

Post by sasawpg »

ctvo wrote: post #8

I disagree with the people who say you're not missing anything working at large companies. Of course it depends on which, but there's great learning opportunities supporting a product used by millions (hundreds of millions). It's a shock to go from this edge case will most likely never happen because we have at most 5 request per second to this edge case is happening every minute because we have 5000 requests per sec…

And great experience to be gained by working with 100s/1000s of diverse team members across the world.

Re: Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

#39

Post by stared »

> As I haven't really worked at big companies, I've always had this nascent feeling that I never really learned "the right way" to do things. I often feel like a "patchwork engineer", learning how things work only sufficiently to make things work in a smaller scale without understanding important big project/organization principles.

What you write reads like a typical ADHD Imposter Syndrom. Why do I bring ADHD? Because you are a jack of all trades[1], experience FOMO, work at startups, and are concerned with not doing things "the proper way". Been there, done that.

There is "Driven to Distraction" book by Hallowell & Ratay (https://www.amazon.com/Driven-Distraction-Revised-Recognizin...), which deals with ADHD in adults. This type of behavior is common. The crucial thing is to accept that one will never be (or should strive for) being a "typical [insert a job here]". So corporations and other well-specified jobs are usually (though not always) bad fits. And there is a lot of strength in that - startups, freelancing, consultants [2].

Furthermore, big companies push this narration that only "things at a scale" matter. I strongly disagree. All startups start from a small scale. And even in big companies, a lot of innovation comes from small, proof-of-concept projects.

[1] The complete phrase is "a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one".

[2] For me, school, studies, even Ph.D. were too standardized. Then I started to shine as a freelance consultant, and now I flourish as a founder. It is good to find one's niche!

Re: Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

#40

Post by mr_johnson22 »

nnoitra wrote: post #12

30s is indeed a painful age to reach. There's a reason many celebs have checked out at 28/29. 30s is so depressing that no matter what you achieve it's like well it's expected or it's so late so no one is impressed. - Made a great company. Big deal, he's in his 30s. - Cured cancer. Pfft. Einsted redefined relativity at 26. - Booked a trip somewhere. Checking off yet another goal off of the bucketlist. - Built a great…

A solution to that attitude is to do things not in a race to please others, or for the sake of doing something impressive, but for their inherent value. Doing so might require a change of one's personal value system, but it's probably a change for the better. Extreme example, but curing cancer to impress people is kind of missing the point.
Post reply on HN