I spent about 7 years at MS and 7 in amazon - mostly around databases. Now I have been with Snap for about 3 years and it has been going great. My reasons were:

I spent about 7 years at MS and 7 in amazon - mostly around databases. Now I have been with Snap for about 3 years and it has been going great. My reasons were: - Agility. Snap moves 10x faster than amazon/ms. - Small size. Our dev community is so much smaller than Fb etc. Last quarter our reported user count was around 188MM? So the amortized # of customers influenced per dev is very high. - Ownership. I am the tech lead for all of analytics in snap (an uber lead as we call it). In Dynamo I was the TL for the storage part alone, my other offers from fb/twitter/oracle et al were around running parts of their machinery. Nothing came close to the extent of ownership provided by snap. An L1 in snap owns 5x of what an L1 would own in FAANG. - Rest of the benefits remain equal / better: You are surrounded by smart people, you have hard problems to solve, perks, benefits and comp are very equivalent to / better than fang. That's pretty much what I tell people during my job sells / interviews as well! If you are looking for the above, you can't beat small companies. On the flip side - FANG do have the scale very few others can only dream of reaching (dynamo did millions of qps per region and ran in 10s of regions). I am obviously hopeful we will make snap that big :)