Ask HN: Moving from the startup world to bigger companies

After college, about 6 or 7 years ago, after having gone overseas to volunteer and teach English. I didn't get paid, but room and board was free, I returned home desperate for a job, and no money.

I applied across the boards on Craigslist and got hired as a programmer for a small company as a programmer, in Visual Basic 6.0, fixing bugs in autobody shop software. They weren't new.. probably had been around since the early 2000s. It was a good job, I enjoyed it.. but the boss was a tyrant. Arrogant. Annoying. There were less than 10 employees working there. I spent over a year working for him and then we had a slight falling out, or really, I just couldn't take the stress of him (not the programming job itself), and I left.

I got another job working for another software company that developed software to read and display data from solar panels on corporate buildings. It was all in Flash, which as you now know, is mostly obsolete. There were around the same amount of employees working at that company. Unfortunately, because they refused to update their technology, they couldn't keep up with the competition and I was laid off.

For these first two.. I wrote about it if you are curious to know the details: http://confessionsoftheprofessions.com/the-opportunity/

My current job was something totally new in regards to environment, as a web developer: I began as a remote worker. It was awesome.. working from home! We were a team of about 12 people from a single department, probably the smallest of all the departments. We build landing pages for corporations... think advertisements and information as news distribution.

Little did I know how big this company actually was... eventually they'd give me the choice: move across the country or get laid off. Why not? I negotiated a nice raise and they paid for my move. This was offered to everyone too.. because there were dozens of remote workers. Unfortunately, most did not take up the offer. There are just a few remote workers left today.

So I went into this huge office... hundreds of cubicles on either side of the building.. over a hundred people or more throughout the day including overnight shifts. There are about a half dozen offices across the country. In the other office, I think there are so many workers they are even sharing cubicles.

Since I've been working at this company, we were bought out by a much larger media corporation that keeps buying up smaller companies to eliminate their competition, aside from the few things that they did have to sell off to avoid those legal monopoly issues. So you could say.. there are 500+ workers in this company. It is interesting... half our team is here and the other half is on the other side of the country. I've never met some of the people I work with everyday, other than some communication through Slack.

As great as it is and as much as I love my job.. I do have dreams of starting my own business someday. I wouldn't consider anything I did job hopping.. the escape from a tyrant, the layoff from an obsolete company, and the last company, a choice: move or get laid off. No regrets.

Keep building your journey.. it sounds like you have a lot of experience in startups and it'd be very interesting to read about it!

I didn't have to explain the job hopping - they understood the startup job market, and the fact that I had worked in those environments was appealing to them.

In short, I wouldn't worry about it. Just make a point of saying in your interview that you're tired of the unpredictability of startup working life and are looking for something more significant.

Assuming you write code for a living, most hiring managers (even big 5 hiring managers) care far less about your work history than you'd imagine- it's merely a means to an end, the end being how well it applies to the skill sets (keywords) needed for the job you're applying for.

Assuming you're not living in a backwater, getting to phone screens should be pretty easy; if you're willing to commit 4-5 hours onsite per opportunity, the odds favor your landing one in the first 10 onsites. Big co's are different from startups, but not as much as you might think going in.

I like how some people consider 100 people a small startup (kind of like how 250 employees is still according to the US government a small business). Maybe my views are out of the mainstream, but I'd say 20 is a better threshold for small.

I worked at a mid-sized mature "startup" for 8 years, then a very young startup for 6 months (then half the team got laid off), then consulted for 3 companies over the course of another 6 months. Hiring managers asked me why I stayed for such a short time at each company (except the first one), including why I wanted to stop consulting -- I told them I wanted a bigger engineering challenge in a less unpredictable environment, and they were fine with that answer. What matters more is how you prove to them that you're a good candidate for their position :)

I focused on the skills that I picked up while being at a smaller company. Talked about the innovation that we did and the fact that we were responsible for the entire product as opposed to just a single portion of the process (i.e. testing).

There are skills that you learn while being at smaller companies and there are skills that you learn while being at larger companies. It's all a matter of communicating why those skills matter to where you're applying to.