Personally for me it has always been faster personal growth from wider responsibilities. This makes a lot of sense in some stages of your career and your career goals but hardly for everyone.
I’ve never heard of any startups where you can obtain faster skill or personal growth. “Wear many hats” means you must be whatever type of firefighting janitor the company needs this week, which often causes skill atrophy not skill growth.
Larger companies not only offer better compensation, but usually offer much better career development, responsibility growth, training and “learn by doing” opportunities.
The startup will promise you won’t be blocked by bureaucracy and as an early hire you can lead the design. Total lies. The bureaucracy and dysfunction will be even worse and probably involve a bunch of immature egos and “the design” will be endlessly compromised to get each successive round of diluting funding that yokes you to more and more traditional management bureaucracy through VCs.
After experiencing the special hell of unrestrained founders who don’t know what they are doing and nepotism hires all through middle management, most people quickly realize it’s an insane trap and wish for the comfort of large firm bureaucracy, where at least there’s some minimal policy protection against sexual harassment or cultivating alcoholism as a company value or generally grinding unwitting young people into the ground with 80 hour weeks.
The variation in startups will be much greater than in corporate America, so some startups will be well run, but some will be more badly run than any large company and by some truly vile people. It’s definitely a gamble. Unfortunately, people just out of school lack the experience to judge, so some get lucky and some get taken advantage of. My advice is to treat options like a lottery ticket, make sure you get paid well in cash, and then startups can be a heck of a lot of fun. They won’t pay a google compensation, but enough to be comfortable, and hey, maybe you get lucky!
Early non-founder employees do tend to get screwed relative to the business vultures who show up later, the CTO getting $10 million/year brought on after the company has gone public but did nothing to get it there is just wasteful corporate cronyism.
I think it's more that if you're already the kind of person well-suited to float to the top at a startup, that's what you'll get out of it. But a startup will rarely develop you into that kind of person.
My own experience with after 8 years at various London startups is one of career stagnation because (for various personal reasons) I don't have a personality that lets me thrive in these environments.
It’s like a professor who did happen to get tenure listening to all the post docs talking about how awful academia is. I’m happy for that one lottery winner but their experience doesn’t count for anything.
No, it’s not like this. Most startups promise to be dynamic as a tactic to pay people less and swindle them on poor options deals, then they bait and switch you, the work experience is not as advertised.
If it weren’t for all the ubiquitous articles talking about bait and switch startup jobs, poor startup compensation, cheating founders, controlling VCs, slave driver mentality, rip off stock options, and the poor survivability of companies, you might have a point.
Big corporations will give you more opportunity to “learn by doing” than a startup? Hard to take your comment seriously when you say something like that.
I can tell you haven’t worked in many startups. The work quality is poor - you are basically firefighting all the time. You’re certainly not building new systems or learning how to scale, etc.
If you work at a startup the trick is you have to take the 5% of your work that’s interesting and try to make it seem like that was the 95%, when in reality the 95% is doing all the grunt work because the company cannot scale staffing to distribute that work evenly or according to specialization.
