I currently work at Amazon, but spent most of my career before Amazon at startups. Here are just a few things that, in my experience, this article gets wrong or

I currently work at Amazon, but spent most of my career before Amazon at startups. Here are just a few things that, in my experience, this article gets wrong or over-states: 1. "They [start-ups and next-gen tech companies] want grads who can build scalable systems and program for large-scale, distributed, data-intensive systems that leverage cloud computing." - For start-ups, this is only true if your startup is in that space. Most "start-ups" are trying to find product market fit, and the systems are generally not large scale as a result. 2. "Engineers at established companies mostly work within their specialty areas." - While there's some truth to this, I think it's overstated. In the start-ups I worked with, "engineers" did not do market research. I worked with plenty of specialists at start-ups that worked with language X, but if you asked them to debug an issue in language Y, they'd refuse. In some cases, it can be the opposite of what this article states - engineers at a start-up can often focus on hands-on engineering tasks, whereas in a large company I find a larger portion of my time is around writing documents to align more people around an idea. 3. "The timing of the product release is crucial because it has a direct impact on acquiring customers and affects the bottom line. Significant delays can put a company out of business." - In a large company, you won't go out of business if your release is late, but it could mean that your product gets de-funded. While the change to the company might not be so much, a project getting de-funded certainly affects the daily lives of those involved. So I think this difference is overstated. 4. "Engineers for startups are more likely to play a significant role in defining the system architecture" - My experience is that this depends a lot on the start-up and the seniority of the engineer in question.