The advice in this article would make a lot more sense if the title were "Why You Should Found a Startup at Least Once", because working for a startup as an employee, even a fairly early employee, really isn't all that different from working for a larger company. There are more changes in direction, that's all. But you're not the one calling the shots on the changes, so whatever. (I've worked as a junior employee for…
> because working for a startup as an employee, even a fairly early employee, really isn't all that different from working for a larger company How so? Typically with a large company an engineer is exposed to a variety of stakeholders, such as other engineers, designers, DBAs, product managers, project managers, program managers, engineering managers with more or less clearly defined roles. At a startup a bunch of th…
The difference was that most of these senior people did quite a bit of grunt work that in a larger organization would have been delegated. The VP did a lot of program manager work and the leads did a lot of design and development, since they only had a couple of subordinates each.
But because the roles and hierarchies were established, it was usually clear whose responsibility it was to make any particular decision. We had on paper a formal organization suitable for a much larger team. We could have telescoped out to three times the number of engineers without adding any more senior people; the leads and VP would just have spent more time on leadership duties and less on direct implementation. I suspect the presence of the formal hierarchy was why the organization felt very mature.
Are things different in other companies of the same size?