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I interned at Yahoo's research lab for 11 months last year, and it gave me some idea of a BIG high-tech company. Yes, I did experience quite a bit of the bureau

I interned at Yahoo's research lab for 11 months last year, and it gave me some idea of a BIG high-tech company. Yes, I did experience quite a bit of the bureaucracy and sluggish speed of large corporations, but this was minimal compared to the fun I had, especially with the group of people I met and worked with. I'm specifically thinking in terms of future opportunities. Would you, as a hiring manager, be more interested in a candidate with obvious experience at well known names in the industry, or at startups that, possibly, no longer exist when the person comes around to interview with you?

nostrademons 19y ago
All other things being equal, the big "brand name" company is better. Seeing Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft on a resume is a big green flag saying to take another look, something that a small company won't get you. Again, that's all other things being equal - if the line item is "Yahoo Inc. - Performed performance testing and bugfixes on the company's intranet calendar" vs. "Defunct Startup Inc. - Designed and built the entire UI of our company's sole product", the startup candidate is more appealing, because they've done more. (That was roughly the difference in responsibilities between my big-company internship and small-company internship, BTW; though the big company is a lot less well-known than Yahoo.) Of course, this requires that the company you're applying to gets few enough applications that they can actually read each one, instead of just skimming for keywords and places of employment. That's perhaps another reason why startup-people tend to keep working in startups, and big-company people tend to keep working in big companies. Another factor: there's diminishing returns in brand recognition. If you've already got Yahoo on your resume, I'll be taking another look anyway, and so you don't get much additional benefit from having Google as well. Meanwhile, if there's another candidate who also has Yahoo but also had significant responsibilities at a startup, I'd probably give the position to him, because he has a bigger breadth of experience. (At my last employer, one of the parts of my resume that my boss picked out as particularly good was that I had a really wide variety of experience - I'd previously done desktop UIs, I'd done websites, I'd done build automation & testing, I'd done network programming, and I'd done Intranet calendars and such.)

nostrademons 19y ago

All other things being equal, the big "brand name" company is better. Seeing Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft on a resume is a big green flag saying to take another look, something that a small company won't get you. Again, that's all other things being equal - if the line item is "Yahoo Inc. - Performed performance testing and bugfixes on the company's intranet calendar" vs. "Defunct Startup Inc. - Designed and built the entire UI of our company's sole product", the startup candidate is more appealing, because they've done more. (That was roughly the difference in responsibilities between my big-company internship and small-company internship, BTW; though the big company is a lot less well-known than Yahoo.) Of course, this requires that the company you're applying to gets few enough applications that they can actually read each one, instead of just skimming for keywords and places of employment. That's perhaps another reason why startup-people tend to keep working in startups, and big-company people tend to keep working in big companies. Another factor: there's diminishing returns in brand recognition. If you've already got Yahoo on your resume, I'll be taking another look anyway, and so you don't get much additional benefit from having Google as well. Meanwhile, if there's another candidate who also has Yahoo but also had significant responsibilities at a startup, I'd probably give the position to him, because he has a bigger breadth of experience. (At my last employer, one of the parts of my resume that my boss picked out as particularly good was that I had a really wide variety of experience - I'd previously done desktop UIs, I'd done websites, I'd done build automation & testing, I'd done network programming, and I'd done Intranet calendars and such.)