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Counterintuitive to assumptions being made here... you can easily be more of a cog at a 50-5000 employee company than a 5,000+ person company. The medium compa

Counterintuitive to assumptions being made here... you can easily be more of a cog at a 50-5000 employee company than a 5,000+ person company. The medium companies generally have a single true line of business and are focused on tuning & turning that crank, turning $3M/yr to $10-100M/yr. Doing something else makes you a trouble maker, and budgets are watched. The bigger companies will have $100M-100B/yr revenue, so they'll do pretty insane engineering on the old product lines ("let's reimplement PHP with a modern VM!"), and take moonshots to enter new markets big enough to make a dent ("Let's give internet to everyone in Africa.") So both quality of life can be better and the projects can be more interesting and career defining. So yeah, I'd go to bigco, or if a medco, one with enough ridiculous growth/funding to do insane things. But not a lot of years of your life that startups are easily doable, so I switched from R&D to startups, and can always go back later :)

soham 8y ago
Very much this. A couple of more points to add: 1. There was a time when the pay distinction between working for big companies and small/mid was clear and present. But these days, the line is blurring. BigCos have realized that startups are eating their lunch and hence they are investing heavily in new ideas and doing better engineering on the old ones to develop those markets even further, faster. Smaller companies too have realized that they need to compete with the BigCos and hence have started to offer similar comps/perks. More and more of the VC funded fast-growing companies are offering packages competing with BigCos. 2. Hence, for a software engineer, the main reason to join/not-join a company today is less about pay. It's more about the type of work you will get to do, and the people that you want to work with. 3. There is something to be said about having a brand, but given how tech is percolating everything we do, it is also getting very differentiated. There are hence brands in every "flavor" of tech. e.g. if you want to work on self-driving cars, Waymo is a great brand. But if you want to work on healthcare tech, there are others. I train software engineers to do better at challenging interviews and I do that for a living. The way I see it, the landscape has been shifting in this direction for at least past 5 years, if not more. At least in the large tech hubs of the US.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  I'm going to have to push back on your first point about compensation between large and small companies. At a large brand name tech company, $300k isn't uncommon for a few years of experience in SFBA or NYC. You don't need to land on the right team or have magical luck, you just need to be a solid performer. Even though startups are increasing base salary, they don't have liquid RSUs as a rule and (in my experience) pay smaller bonuses overall. I would say that if a software engineer is optimizing for income maximization they should almost certainly join one of FAANG, unless they have a formidable appetite for risk and uncertainty. Consider some of the data compiled here: https://www.levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi.
6ak74rfy 8y ago
I concur with your sentiments here. For instance, there are so many things brewing inside Amazon that I know I'll always have a new area to explore whenever I want. For e.g., the world is talking about building serverless architectures, but I can actually work on the platform that will power that move. I can work in any of the cloud databases, build workflows or the platforms that power other to do so, build low latency services etc. So, I can easily get breadth. I can also get depth if I want - embedded systems, etc. In short, there are opportunities. It's up to you how you utilize them.
borplk 8y ago
I agree but keep in mind it's not that easy to choose to work on those interesting stuff at bigco. If they want you to oil the gears on a legacy application that's what you do. You have to either get lucky, go in specifically to work on those projects, or slowly fit yourself in those teams after doing boring stuff.
ashwinaj 8y ago
> > and take moonshots to enter new markets big enough to make a dent If you're talking about FAANG, which I assume you are, that's possibly true. But they aren't the only "big companies". There are tons of big cos which do not do any R&D (Cisco, Oracle and the like) and instead acquire startups to grow. And here's the kicker, they don't care for employee development; so choose wisely.
- lmeyerov 8y ago
  RE:R&D, that's... not true. At the mega-scale, Cisco will fund regular moonshots that they'll "acquire" for ~$0.5B upon success. In general, because most technical startups are a wreck and otherwise have technical impedance mismatch with the acquirer, acquisitions likely have integration + technical expansion periods for the first few years before thy succeed/die. Agreed with others: Opportunities are there, more about whether individuals go for them. And if you mean it doesn't just magically happen, yep. AFAICT, even at Google/FB/etc., PMs have to fight for who they get, and they probably fight for a lot of the same people, and the rest no one really knows...
  - ashwinaj 8y ago
    > RE:R&D, that's... not true. At the mega-scale, Cisco will fund regular moonshots that they'll "acquire" for ~$0.5B upon success. Yes they are external entities, not part of Cisco. Cisco I believe calls them "spin-ins". They aren't Cisco employees though.

soham 8y ago

Very much this. A couple of more points to add: 1. There was a time when the pay distinction between working for big companies and small/mid was clear and present. But these days, the line is blurring. BigCos have realized that startups are eating their lunch and hence they are investing heavily in new ideas and doing better engineering on the old ones to develop those markets even further, faster. Smaller companies too have realized that they need to compete with the BigCos and hence have started to offer similar comps/perks. More and more of the VC funded fast-growing companies are offering packages competing with BigCos. 2. Hence, for a software engineer, the main reason to join/not-join a company today is less about pay. It's more about the type of work you will get to do, and the people that you want to work with. 3. There is something to be said about having a brand, but given how tech is percolating everything we do, it is also getting very differentiated. There are hence brands in every "flavor" of tech. e.g. if you want to work on self-driving cars, Waymo is a great brand. But if you want to work on healthcare tech, there are others. I train software engineers to do better at challenging interviews and I do that for a living. The way I see it, the landscape has been shifting in this direction for at least past 5 years, if not more. At least in the large tech hubs of the US.

throwawaymath 8y ago
I'm going to have to push back on your first point about compensation between large and small companies. At a large brand name tech company, $300k isn't uncommon for a few years of experience in SFBA or NYC. You don't need to land on the right team or have magical luck, you just need to be a solid performer. Even though startups are increasing base salary, they don't have liquid RSUs as a rule and (in my experience) pay smaller bonuses overall. I would say that if a software engineer is optimizing for income maximization they should almost certainly join one of FAANG, unless they have a formidable appetite for risk and uncertainty. Consider some of the data compiled here: https://www.levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi.

6ak74rfy 8y ago

I concur with your sentiments here. For instance, there are so many things brewing inside Amazon that I know I'll always have a new area to explore whenever I want. For e.g., the world is talking about building serverless architectures, but I can actually work on the platform that will power that move. I can work in any of the cloud databases, build workflows or the platforms that power other to do so, build low latency services etc. So, I can easily get breadth. I can also get depth if I want - embedded systems, etc. In short, there are opportunities. It's up to you how you utilize them.

borplk 8y ago

I agree but keep in mind it's not that easy to choose to work on those interesting stuff at bigco. If they want you to oil the gears on a legacy application that's what you do. You have to either get lucky, go in specifically to work on those projects, or slowly fit yourself in those teams after doing boring stuff.

ashwinaj 8y ago

> > and take moonshots to enter new markets big enough to make a dent If you're talking about FAANG, which I assume you are, that's possibly true. But they aren't the only "big companies". There are tons of big cos which do not do any R&D (Cisco, Oracle and the like) and instead acquire startups to grow. And here's the kicker, they don't care for employee development; so choose wisely.

lmeyerov 8y ago
RE:R&D, that's... not true. At the mega-scale, Cisco will fund regular moonshots that they'll "acquire" for ~$0.5B upon success. In general, because most technical startups are a wreck and otherwise have technical impedance mismatch with the acquirer, acquisitions likely have integration + technical expansion periods for the first few years before thy succeed/die. Agreed with others: Opportunities are there, more about whether individuals go for them. And if you mean it doesn't just magically happen, yep. AFAICT, even at Google/FB/etc., PMs have to fight for who they get, and they probably fight for a lot of the same people, and the rest no one really knows...
- ashwinaj 8y ago
  > RE:R&D, that's... not true. At the mega-scale, Cisco will fund regular moonshots that they'll "acquire" for ~$0.5B upon success. Yes they are external entities, not part of Cisco. Cisco I believe calls them "spin-ins". They aren't Cisco employees though.