4 ms·

A great way to do this: join a small startup. I did, and I learned more in the first week than I could have ever hoped to at my old job. Also related: https://

• shados 10y ago
  assuming both the startup and the "big company" you compare it to are great in their respective categories, I find it to be a wash. My career was split pretty 50/50 between startups and big companies (about half dozen of each as my sample size), I found them to be similar in term of learning. You just learn different things. At a startup you're more likely to do everything and wear all the hats, see things from the beginning and build stuff from scratch. That also means you don't get to see as much of how tech debt can be efficiently paid off, how to maintain large systems, or can't have the hindsight 20/20 of all the solutions to problems startups face. My early careers was mostly startups, and I felt I had learnt a ton. Then joined bigger highly successful tech companies, and realized there were much better ways to do everything I had seen (solutions that would have worked at the startup scale in many cases)