Pro: how much you learn. My first engineering job was at a startup. I learned an enormous amount in a year because there were never more than 3 engineers in th

Pro: how much you learn. My first engineering job was at a startup. I learned an enormous amount in a year because there were never more than 3 engineers in that period. I had to learn the basics - git etiquette, how changes are managed, how work is planned. But I also had to learn almost every technical layer. One day you're setting up DNS records for a new subdomain, the next you're choosing a JavaScript test framework, the next you're working with the CTO on designing an offline job-processor. It's a great breadth of experience that's hard to get at big companies, where projects typically have much longer timelines. People stay on one team, on one project, for years. At a startup, you do it all in a mad dash, probably absorbing technical debt, which is also important. "Shit, the database migration didn't work, I just took down the site, shit shit shit" is a really important lesson that you can be hard to get at a big company. I've worked at companies ranging from 3 employees up to 50,000+. Definitely learned the most at the smallest scales. I see this when hiring, too. It seems from my experience that an engineer with 1 year of experience at a startup is typically much better-prepared than an engineer with 1 year of experience at Google (sample size < 10, I am likely biased by my experience and expectations, many exceptions possible of course).