41–50 of 95 posts
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…
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…
I don't think that's against the grain, and completely agree with the overrated part. The most surefire way for someone to become financially independent is to work in big tech. The money and job security is unmatched.
I've seen it said before that entrepreneurs don't start companies because they want to, but because they have to. Either they can't get those high paying jobs at a big corp or just can't deal with the BS. I found found this to be mostly true IME.
If someone can be a good corporate worker at any of the bigs techs, they should absolutely take that job over pretty much every other option.
I like the independence of working at a startup and the speed at which things get done. This is also a curse though, because it often feels like engineers are competing for who can own or take over a project first. Things are done quickly but also haphazardly; for example, I recently jumped on a project where the lead engineer whipped up the repository within a day and already added a Makefile that had a couple of completely broken commands due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the build process.
With larger companies, I liked that I can largely remain invisible if I want to. So long as I finish my JIRA tickets, I usually "sign off" early and leave my messenger on if I'm needed for any urgent matters. Usually the leaders aren't expecting me to go "above and beyond" like my current job often feels like. I fulfill my creative programming pursuits on my freetime, and I prefer it that way. Also, I do prefer designated PTO time as opposed to "unlimited PTO" like many startups now offer.
So right now I'm in favor of larger companies, but take this with a grain of salt because I've only been in the startup world for 6 months.
I've worked at small companies for 10 years, large companies for 5... and IMO you're not missing anything. After switching back to a small company it's a big relief, much of the big company "experience" is learning to deal with tons of bullshit. Small companies have their own problems to deal with, but to me they feel like actual problems... a lot of big company stuff is kind of corporate theatrics. Maybe it's necess…
Big $CORP employee here. This is a pretty solid take in the parent comment. Big companies offer good pay and advancement opportunities. But, that does come with a heavy dose of corporate theatrics and organizational bullshit. At small companies, on the other hand, your options to advance may be more limited, and if you don't like the job you're in, you can't always jump to a different part of the company the way you…
We used to get things done quickly, and now we have all these bureaucratic layers inserted. But they are also immature in that folks are often thinking in the old world "we must pivot" mindset, which we just can't do given how things don't move quickly anymore.
At the startup I set up Linux server instances on Google Cloud and Digital Ocean. I set up Apache web servers etc. I wrote Python REST APIs on the servers. I did Javascript web work on the servers. I also wrote code for an iOS app in XCode. I also wrote more than one Android app from scratch.
Now I work at a non-tech Fortune 100 company. I only do Android. 95% of the time I am working within one module. I also tend to work on similar features during a quarter and across quarters. How much coding I do can vary, but the amount I spend coding is less than the time I spend in meetings, or reading documentation another team wrote, or helping or asking for help from someone, or doing code review or handling the release process.
You're not necessarily going to learn "the right way" to do things, you're going to learn the large organization way to do things. You're better off at a small company with a good, experienced mentor than at a big company without one.
An example for a big company...HN is fairly simple, Reddit is a little more complex. Think of the notion of a post or reply or user on Reddit. Initially these concepts will be pretty simple, but as more features are added they become more complex. I can imagine what the internal data structure is at Reddit is of a post or a user. Not only is it probably very complex, I'm sure some of the data structure is vestigial, old stuff no longer used that was never cleaned up. Changes against these things are by teams, often tending toward the more junior, often on tight deadlines, and the codebase is an accumulation of many years of this. I don't know much about Reddit internally but it is an easy example to think about.
> 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? Becau…
I've often wondered about ADHD but since I know a couple of close friends with serious ADHD, I haven't considered it too much as I'm not comparable to my friends level.
Although, I tried ADHD medication (through friend) and it was eye opening how easy focusing on one task became, and how nondetrimental context switching and parallel scattered thoughts became for focus and anxiety.
The other major advantage of Big tech is typically financial, there is no guarantee that this will last indefinitely - but over the last 15 years the top tech firms have paid better than all other options by a wide margin. This isn't necessarily unique to big tech and could apply to any tech company considered a "top firm".
These trends will likely continue until tech firms paying top salaries either become too bloated to innovate and instead focus on building strange non-profitable vanity projects - or are outmatched by companies using lower cost engineers.
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…
> I'll go against the grain and say that working in startups has been hugely overrated. I don't think that's against the grain, and completely agree with the overrated part. The most surefire way for someone to become financially independent is to work in big tech. The money and job security is unmatched. I've seen it said before that entrepreneurs don't start companies because they want to, but because they have to.…
I've worked at startups where they brag about not being a big company despite no one there even having ever worked at a big company. In hindsight, it should have been a big red flag.
If you're a hiring manager in a large company, what are the pros and cons you see about hiring engineers who have only worked in startups?
Vice versa, if you're a hiring manager in a startup, what are the cons and pros you see about hiring engineers who have only worked in Fortune 500 companies?
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.