> For most junior folks I meet, I recommend starting their career at a big company rather than a startup. Yes, absolutely this. I'm surprised to see recommenda

> For most junior folks I meet, I recommend starting their career at a big company rather than a startup. Yes, absolutely this. I'm surprised to see recommendations to do a startup as a first job. That's not a good idea. A new grad who has never worked anywhere might know how to code quite well academically but they have zero exposure to how to build a commercial product. Semester-long projects at school can't teach that. That's how you end up with codebases without source control, no code reviews, no architecture, tons of security problems and so on. Go work a few stints at large respected companies (in whatever field you are in). Absorb everything you can about how and why they do things. Understand the processes and why they exist. There's a reason for everything. Then go do startups. You'll know how mature products are engineered, and you'll understand which parts of the processes make sense for a startup (not much, but you'll know) and you'll know how and when to slowly start introducing more maturity as the startup grows. By now in my career I've worked at every size company, from 100K+ people multinationals to 3 person startups and just about every size and maturity point in between. I would never hire a zero-experience person to a tiny startup, that makes no sense. It would be bad for them and bad for the startup.