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This sounds great when you envision that big company as Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Facebook. It sounds less so when you envision that company as Oracle, eBay,
by curun1r 11y ago
This sounds great when you envision that big company as Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Facebook. It sounds less so when you envision that company as Oracle, eBay, Yahoo! or SAP. Some large companies are mostly going to teach you politics, byzantine process and spending money as a means of scaling bad software.
It's important to differentiate skills learned at big companies. Some are very useful, but others are coping mechanisms that have no place in a startup. Meanwhile, the scrappiness and well-rounded skill set learned at a startup will almost always have a place in larger businesses.
My own personal recommendation for early career workers would be to prefer the cream-of-the-crop mid and large companies where you'll get useful experience you can't find anywhere else, then prefer startups and leave the slower-moving and more dysfunctional larger companies as a last resort.
- sbilstein 11y agoyes. which big company matters so much. i find it frustrating when my hacker school friends deride big companies as having no interesting work being done or not being great places to work. Having worked at startups and two different big corporations, I've learned the most at the very large company I work at now, almost nothing at the first one I did and a mixed bag at startups.
- baudehlo 11y agoHeck, even well known boring big companies (eg IBM, Oracle) have great smaller teams that are doing interesting things. Much of it is a crapshoot. The nice benefit of the smaller company is that you have much higher likelihood of seeing your code go into production, and experiencing the feedback from it being used. At a big company you will get shielded from that. Often for good reasons - but the feedback truly helps your career.
- relkor 11y agoDont't knock spending money to scale. The most important lesson I learned at BigCorp was when to buy vs build. Not Invented Here syndrome will kill even mega companies.