As a software engineer at a large company, you will be a cog in a machine. You will probably be one of dozens working on a given project. You may have specifi

As a software engineer at a large company, you will be a cog in a machine. You will probably be one of dozens working on a given project. You may have specific duties ("Implement these features as they are designed") or you may have a broad mandate ("Make this thing better, figure out how.") but you will rarely have a feature or a product you can point to and say "this is my work, I made it". You will have contributed in a small (but sometimes critical) way to a big product used by millions or billions of people. You will be able to tell people, "I work at this place on that product" and most of the time they will know what you are talking about. Every big company has office politics; office politics are like the sports and games inside Final Fantasy games. In some companies they are just a fun diversion that you can get some neat loot out of, in other companies they are critical to the game and you can't win without playing them. You will be paid very well for this, and have exquisite benefits. Your eye doctor will comment on the comprehensiveness of your vision plan. As a software engineer at a small, new startup, you will be responsible for everything, soup to nuts. Depending on how early you start, you will be in complete control of the technical details of the entire software stack you work on, OS, language, source control, frameworks, everything. You might be told what to build by the founder/CTO/CEO, there might be a PM who designs the product for you to implement, or you might be responsible for designing the product given broad strokes and feedback. You will almost certainly be responsible for all of the development, testing and production support of the software you work on. If you do not test the code thoroughly, no one will. If you do not make a backup plan to backup company-critical data somewhere, it won't be backed up. If a server goes down at 3am, it will be you that gets called to fix it as quickly as possible. If you do your job poorly, you and everyone you know will be out of a job. When you tell people what you work on and where, they will pretend to understand or be interested, but you will be able to tell they don't really care. You could be paid anywhere between nothing and a good wage, and will probably have some sort of benefits. You will be given a random amount of stock or stock options, which will probably be worth nothing but could hypothetically be worth billions.