> I am very wary about claims like those from the article about how working for a lower salary at startups will allow you to somehow compress N years of career

> I am very wary about claims like those from the article about how working for a lower salary at startups will allow you to somehow compress N years of career experience into (N-k) years of actual work. That claim has never made any sense to me (I think I first saw pg make it). In my experience, there's little to no practical difference between working as a developer at most startups and doing the same at a bigcorp in terms of experience. There's certainly a lot of rah-rah-rah about the "startup culture", but places like Google try very hard to make their employees happy as well. There might be a little more cowboy coding at the startup and a little more bureaucracy at the bigcorp (though it's a good manager's job to shield engineers from that bureaucracy), but your future job prospects are almost always better when you've got a bigcorp stint on your resume.