Why should I start my career at Microsoft, rather than a startup?

I did not start my career at Microsoft, but I worked there for quite a while, alongside many who did. As far as I am concerned, the primary upshot of working there is that it's decent resume material. But beware- after 5 years of being there, it starts being a resume killer. Seattle companies are wary of developers too indoctrinated in Microsoft's ways. I would not recommend staying there for more than 3 years.

Furthermore, I am very (very) thankful that I did not start my career at Microsoft, but rather at small startups. The primary drawbacks I see for starting at Microsoft are:

* You do not really learn from your mistakes- there are sooo many code reviews, design reviews, test reviews, etc that it's essentially waterfall planning and you have very little chance to experiment and fail. Which I think is critical for starting out. You're surrounded by very experienced people, but at first what you really need to do is to learn on your own (in a production environment).

* There is a certain lack of energy on many teams at Microsoft (not all, but a large majority). You're young, you have nothing to lose, may as well learn what it feels like to work on a small team and crank out features like your company is going to go bankrupt in 3 months.

* At Microsoft, you learn to code. At smaller companies, you learn everything. A bit of customer support, business models, ux design, etc. A small company gives you a great broad base of experience from which you can build on in any direction. Microsoft for the most part, is more of a specialist (one person who just works on installers, one person just working on build system, etc).

I spent most of my career at Microsoft. 14 years, in fact. I had a great run there, and there was a lot of good, and plenty of bad, like anything. I just up and left one day, so take that for what it's worth.

But I did spend a lot of time hiring, coaching, and observing junior engineers of all stripes.

At junior levels, I don't think it's about MS v Startup as much as "Big Company v Startup". As Steve Blank says, startups aren't minified big companies, they are a different species.

On balance, I still believe a bigger company is a better place for a first job than a startup. This is not a rule, but a preference.

My main reason for this is that the number one goal of a new engineer is learning to be a better engineer. On balance, this happens faster when you're in the presence of more senior folks to mentor and challenge you.

If you're doing a startup with a bunch of folks with similar experience levels, you'll learn plenty but you'll also bake in some bad habits.

A corallary, as noted here, is that a larger company pays you and let you focus on your core job role, versus "wearing many hats", which is great for someone who's got some things down pat, and not so great for n00bs.

This is a vast generalization and frankly there are some caveats here with MS in particular (and maybe others, n=1) that might get in the way, but in general I think structure is good until you're really equipped to make a run.

My first job was at a startup and I came to this conclusion when I left there 1996, and nothing in between has changed my mind.