I completely disagree. Disclaimer: I work at a megacorp, but as someone with 25 years in companies of a variety of sizes, I think I have some perspective. Ear

I completely disagree. Disclaimer: I work at a megacorp, but as someone with 25 years in companies of a variety of sizes, I think I have some perspective. Early in my career I worked as an IC at a non-profit, a small tech company, a startup (that went from 15 to 200 to 75), and some other medium/large tech companies. I'm currently a senior engineering director at a FAANG. If I had a time machine and could do it all over again, I'd absolutely start by joining a FAANG. I'm actually a bit jealous when I compare the T3/T4 experience to what was available to me. They're able to learn from & work with some of the best in the industry. Their ability to advance is based largely only on themselves. Sure, I had a lot of autonomy but it's also a lot like learning the piano without a teacher. You make so many mistakes that you don't know you're making. Likewise the tech-stack is pretty good. Not perfect (by any measure) but heads & shoulders better than what you'll find at most places. And the variety of problems is hard to beat. Work at a company that does X, your only choice are going to be problems relating to X. Get tired of working on something at megatech? Transfer. If you're good, teams will be thrilled to have you. A lot of your knowledge will carry over, and so too, your reputation. Now do megacorps care about you? Well, as much as any company will. To be honest, I don't think any company really will "care" about you (at least in how I care about family) and I think it's disingenuous for the author to pretend otherwise. Both megacorps & smaller companies do care about you in a sense of wanting you to do well. But if push comes to shove, both will lay you off if financially they're forced to. I learned the hard way at the startup. Not because I was laid off, but because I had to make the list of people to layoff in my group. It really, really sucked as we felt like a family. I really admire that the CTO saw I was struggling and talked with me at length about it. I learned as a manager at any company you have to be willing to do these things for the good of everyone overall, and the best you can do is be fair about the decisions and be humane to those let go. Is that caring? My family would never do that. And if that's caring, that's exactly the same mindset I see in megacorps. Obviously megacorps aren't perfect, but if you apply the same standard to them & whatever other option, I think they stack up pretty well.