Y Combinator partners tell MIT students to steer clear of big-name companies

This is very seductive advice: don't become a cog, become a shining star. Jump right into the role which gives you the responsibility you deserve.

Except, CS graduates have no idea what it means to work in a corporate environment. I didn't - I learned about Big-O notation, binary sorts and searches, and lots of algorithms. I didn't learn how to navigate corporate politics, PCI or HIPPA regulations, the reasons security really matters, or how to write software which needs to survive for years past the deadline.

Perhaps even worse, recent college graduates going straight to startups are unlikely to find mentors to work alongside; they end up working without safety net, someone who can help soften the impact of their inexperience and facilitate catching bugs when the cost to fix them is 1x, instead of 100x. I didn't know how to take critiques of my code as critiques of my code, not my baby.

If they're successful, and their company hires people with experience at growing businesses, their world will be turned upside down as their projects are taken away from them and they are relegated to smaller and smaller roles (or worse, be promoted to management). They will go from being the star to a cog, and many will find it hard to accept; it will slow the company's growth and make the transition more painful than it needs to be.

I once had to walk a developer from a 4 year old startup through the hows and whys of separating variables from code. They knew and had experienced the pain points of having hard-coded values everywhere, but were unaware of the best practices and didn't know where to start.

I keep saying "cog" as if it's a bad thing. It's really not - the machine can't run without someone filling the role you fill. And yes, you are somewhat replaceable, but you knew this. That replacability is why we can job hop the way we do. And if you're willing to accept this, you can make the most out of it. Learn from your betters, hone your skills by mentoring others, replace yourself with code, and move on to something more challenging. Or, once you have the experience, create/join a startup, understanding what the future holds if you succeed.

I'm not someone that drinks the startup koolaid by any means, but I agree with them that working for a large company has very limited value if your goal is to start your own company.

I worked for one of the biggest tech companies as a developer, and I learned no real skills in my tenure there. My responsibilities were just so narrowly focused and any knowledge I gained was specific to that codebase, which is not useful at all to potential future work.

The sad thing is, the best way to increase efficiency at that job was knowing the existing codebase better. I chose to quit instead.

> what sets Sam apart is how much he believes in you. You generally don't find it elsewhere in the world. It's rare for your own parents to really believe in you in the way Sam does.

What does this mean? And why are you emphasizing it so much? Sam is an investor, he believes in people who he thinks will succeed. By definition, he's not going to believe in a very large set of people. But he will believe in people who seem promising... it really is very useless to point out that he 'believes' in people.

> Why go to a big company where they definitely won't believe in you or let you forge your own opportunities?

Because there's greater security in working for a big company, generally speaking, than starting a startup. Though as others have mentioned, the audience here were a self-selected group of MIT students... it's not as outrageous for Sam to have said what he has said there. I do have a problem with him abusing his platform when he starts generalizing this kind of advice (previously he's said it's better to start a startup than work for a company to a more general audience -- it's just a bad thing for him to say, but that's a topic for another day).

> we are talking about those people who are willing to trade off security for a chance of building something great

I object to your phrasing (though not your thesis), because it's the type of phrasing used for other forms of hero worship: police, firefighters, military personnel, etc. It's the kind of wording used by star-struck wannabes, to be frank.

I also object to your use of "great", because I think that--with few exceptions--most startups aren't working on stuff that'll make the world a better place. Most startups work on stuff that'll get funded; that means you see lots of largely similar companies in startupland. (I suspect a contributing factor is also the relative lack of life experience of a lot of these founders: they simply haven't seen enough of the world to be more imaginative[1].) And that generally isn't stuff that will make the world better, because those kinds of problems are hard, and often require lots of financial and non-financial capital to work, even if at the end of the day, there's a lot of money to be made for the players that are successful.

> Not everyone is suited for this sort of thing

Normative phrasing aside, there're equally-valid alternative explanations: not everyone believes they are a beautiful and unique snowflake. Or, gambling is more fun when done at a casino. :)

[1] You alluded to a phenomenon in your other comment, about younger people not knowing how to tackle a problem they might encounter if they worked for a big company. I suspect that's more a function of lack of experience in that they couldn't even imagine the problem unless they'd worked in an environment where it would arise. I suspect this is why you see relatively few enterprise-y, B2B startups, despite the untapped goldmines in that space.

The biggest reason to work at a large company is that they are likely to pay you market salary, instead of ramen-profitable plus pie-in-the-sky for the 0.1% of the company they let you have while you work alongside the founders with 30% each.