> You want to work at a company on a strong growth trajectory for lots of reasons, but a big one is your own growth potential. You will learn the most the faste

> You want to work at a company on a strong growth trajectory for lots of reasons, but a big one is your own growth potential. You will learn the most the fastest at places that are growing fast, and have way more openings for promotions and leadership roles than a slower-growing company. I would argue this one is a bit more subtle and has some game theory dynamics to it. Yes, it is strictly true that faster growth means more promo opportunities, however it also can hide a lot of problems and obscure your individual contributions. And it's not just politics or optics—as an IC it's just harder for you to really see and understand the true impact of your own work. In a rocket ship environment where the business trajectory has already been established, engineering skill is useful but not strictly necessary for success. A lot of people learn more about working the system than they do about how to actually build things. In a company is hot enough that they can draw heavily from Stanford/MIT and FAANG veterans, you find a lot of folks who have not faced real adversity in their work-life. Many have a sense of entitlement about getting promoted on a regular cadence and are more concerned with their promo packet than the quality of their work. By contrast, there is tremendous value to working in startups or smaller companies that have traction but not hyper-growth. In these places you can move faster and get faster feedback. Impact is viscerally seen in the product, not abstracted beyond massive user numbers divided over thousands of engineers. If you grow up in this environment and then go to a bigger company you can see things others can't because people who spent their whole career in a big company optimize for delegation and communication rather than end-to-end understanding. Whether this translates into climbing the greasy pole I'm not sure, but I think it does give you more options to control your own destiny.