Ask HN: FOMO by working in startups only vs. Big companies

Oh you are not missing anything great at bigger companies. There is no “right way” there either. But I think you have to experience both sides yourself to understand. I can predict the future: you will go work for a big company someday and then go back to a startup.

> I've now worked for about 3-4 years, so still a junior, but mostly at startups (and in my 3rd one).

Your issue here is really tenure , there’s a lot of software engineering fields for which you won’t know anything after a year in the role.

I've worked at small and mega enterprise. I will pick small/medium over big anyday for how to do things the 'right' way. Enterprise doesn't care about the right way so much, too many policies and politics get in the way. Similarly you can also get a very 'just get it out the door' attitude at some very small companies.

However you can also find small/medium companies that understand that they need to ship, but also understand how to properly run things. There is a much greater chance of that happening at a small/medium company than any big company.

I think this could happen at a small or large company. It sounds like instead of blindly choosing a company, you need to figure out how to pick teams and projects where you can grow.

Some things to look for include senior engineers who are happy to mentor (not teach or guide or instruct but to mentor), look for companies that are growing or making new products, and if all else fails look for a place with some sort of educational stipend you can spend going to industry conferences or what not.

This isn't really a fight between corp and startups. I have seen the smallest startups more organized than the biggest corps. It's always about the people.

Personally, I believe starting at a bigger company has many benefits, even though I would now never join one. Considering you never worked there, I don't think a short experience wouldn't be enlightening. Just to learn the rights and wrongs. Be vary about the teams you're joining, though. Sounds to me like you need to figure out first what kind of dynamic you're looking for.

Try it out! You're still young. If it's not your cup of tea, you can pivot back.

My FOMO issue was wanting to work in one of the sexy Silicon Valley style tech companies, after having only worked in big enterprise non-tech companies for my entire career. Recently made the switch last year. In my case, the grass was indeed greener on the other side.

I disagree with the people who say you're not missing anything working at large companies. Of course it depends on which, but there's great learning opportunities supporting a product used by millions (hundreds of millions).

It's a shock to go from this edge case will most likely never happen because we have at most 5 request per second to this edge case is happening every minute because we have 5000 requests per second. Your approach to monitoring, deploying, and writing software changes.

I don't think you are missing anything here. Both work in different ways (I have worked with companies as large as 250k+ employees to 2 employees). Both try to achieve different things (make something from zero, and create drastic value, v/s incremental changes and building and sustaining existing revenue streams) As an engineer: in bigger company, you will learn how large scale projects are pulled with so many people, v/s in small ones, you know what you are learning. In startup's favour: since a company from 2-1000 employees can be called a startup, so what I mentioned about large scale projects in bigger companies, you can learn that in these companies as well. I would suggest you to speak to more such people and get their perspective. You will figure out what both businesses offer, and based on what you want to do in your life, you can make an informed decision.

I've worked at small companies for 10 years, large companies for 5... and IMO you're not missing anything. After switching back to a small company it's a big relief, much of the big company "experience" is learning to deal with tons of bullshit. Small companies have their own problems to deal with, but to me they feel like actual problems... a lot of big company stuff is kind of corporate theatrics. Maybe it's necessary at scale, but it isn't fun.

30s is indeed a painful age to reach. There's a reason many celebs have checked out at 28/29. 30s is so depressing that no matter what you achieve it's like well it's expected or it's so late so no one is impressed.

- Made a great company. Big deal, he's in his 30s.

- Cured cancer. Pfft. Einsted redefined relativity at 26.

- Booked a trip somewhere. Checking off yet another goal off of the bucketlist.

- Built a great body. Well he's just desperately trying to hold on to youth.

I mean it's not even 30 it's 3O. The O stands for Over.

Tooling is better at large corps, they will teach you how to build things at scale. Autonomy is greater at startups, they will teach you to do everything yourself.

At a large corp, if you don't like the tooling, it sucks because changing it is akin to pushing against a mountain (doable but you will burn an insane amount of time and value doing so). At a startup, there's the instability and the nagging feeling that what you cobbled together could have been done better "if you just had more time."

It's a tradeoff between autonomy and institutionalization, and that really comes down to personal choice. Some of the best roles are where you can exercise your autonomy in a large organization (within bounds).

Don't bother working for a large company. If you haven't seen it already, just watch the movie Office Space (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/) and you can see everything you need to know about doing software at a big company.

That being said, you have to understand that your new job isn't at a "Big company", your new job is at Amazon: a completely different beast. I live in the greater Seattle area and I can tell you there are two types of Amazon workers doing software development - those who quietly work their jobs and never talk to non-Amazon folks about it one way or the other (e.g. "my Amazon job is great! You should work here!" or "My Amazon job is hell"), or people who are Ex-Amazon who have NOTHING good to say about working there (except for the fact that they left the job). Be careful.

I've felt the exact same way after working (consulting) for mostly very large companies. I'd love to do a startup at some point in my career and sometime I have FOMO on that experience. The grass is always greener.

It's mostly in your imagination. Big companies don't have any better idea how to do things, often worse. I think it's beneficial to work for a large company for a while, if only just to see how things are and to say you've done it. But as far as getting to : "doing things properly", that's something you will need to figure out as you go, by applying critical thinking and by trying to work with competent colleagues where possible.

Amazon probably has one of the worst reputations available for a major tech employer, so even if you find the grass rather brown, it may just be Amazon.

You're not saying what roles you'd try and go for at a big company. If it's robotics, I'm sure they'll assess your tehcnical knowledge and then not sweat the size/scale of your engineering work. If it's a transition into non-robotics software engineering (which is what I'm guessing your friend did), you might not have the level of experience and skill to immediately get a software job at Amazon or other big companies, but you'll for sure find many companies willing to help you change careers. Just seeing robotics on a resume is enough to pique my interest and want to talk, I'd imagine lots of hiring managers feel similarly. I don't think I've ever assessed a candidate and felt that they missed the boat on doing things the right way. It's really about assessing potential and attitude, and if those fall into place, the "right way" can be taught.

I'll go against the grain and say that working in startups has been hugely overrated. Each time I worked way harder for less money, and dealing directly with the owner/ceo makes everything so much more complicated.

At a bigger company, sure it can be a bureaucratic mess - but I have been much personally happier every time. I get more resources, better pay, and much better work/life balance.

I didn't realize how unhappy I was working at startups until I took a corporate job again and my wife made me promise not to do another startup until the kids are grown up.

Me: older self taught startup guy who transferred to a large edu a few years ago.

Not all large co’s act as a monolith. Some allow smaller depts to run their own shop while having access to their resources. This could be bad in terms of learning ‘the right way’ but that’s what interviews are for - to ask them questions too!

You really want to care about the mission of the large co though.

If you find one you like, get in touch with their recruiters, show them your resume and ask point blank if it needs restructuring to make it through their weedout filters. You bring things to the table that don’t always fit in the boxes.

Also widen the scope in terms of how senior you want to go if the co promotes well from within.

Good luck!

My FOMO is that my life is wasted being a corporate cog in a machine and has to come to office to work daily warming seat while I can do my job in 4 hrs of work.

But then I need the money of a big corpo (read: FAANG pay-band) to one day have a financial independence and dream of creating my own startup where I can go work remotely at my cheap COL (cost of living) country and be near my families, solving real problems than just another dating/ecommerce/social media/investing/real estate eque app.

Yeah, a lot of the startups these days also focusing on those dating/ecommerce/social media/investing/real estate business, which I don't find any enjoyment in.

So, why not just work and slave away at big corpo earning FAANG pays.

If you only work at startups you may never really know what the real industry best practices are. The people who are best on any given topic have a tendency to keep it a secret, so you're not necessarily going to be able to learn it outside of direct experience. Startups will often choose the expedient and obvious path to shipping that MVP, even when that pattern has known problems. Of course you can choose an innovative startup and get the opposite experience, but you'd have to choose it carefully and probably on the basis of personal relationships to be sure.

I started my career in a startup and had a similar FOMO, always thinking that the big corps have figured out all these problems we were struggling with, hoping I can one day learn to how.

Then I joined one and had an eye opening experience - it's not true at all. They might have better tooling (although that's not even always the case), and they might have better established ways to do things, but the engineers aren't any better than at a startup and they deal with the same problems as you.

A lot of work at large corps is "patchworking", and a lot of code is pretty awful and won't teach you "the right way" to do anything. Like anywhere else, there's a lot of v1 code that doesn't get substantially improved after it's shipped because the team has moved on to something else. There can be a lot of churn where code gets moved between teams, rewritten and discarded as priorities change and people come and go. Only a minority of core systems get the benefit of being iterated on and evolved over a long period of time.

I believe that the best way to learn how to do things right is to make mistakes yourself and learn from them. Work on a single project long enough so that you don't just write the v1, but also the v2 and v3 and v4 that make you see the mistakes you previously made and let you figure out how to fix them.

Startups can be a good place to do that, because unlike in a bigger place, you might actually be given the scope and responsibility to do that even as a junior engineer.

You are right that maintaining things is a good way to learn, but you could equally spend 3 years moving on from one new micro service to another as the roadmap priorities change every 6 months, with very little opportunity to spend some time with your own code and learn from it.

If you've worked at 3 different places in 3 years, you might not have seen the benefits yet, but if you try to stay and work on something for long enough, you'll learn a ton.

I have experience working at a small "start-up" (3-5 people), medium (50-100) and large (10k+).

The small company gave me the confidence and experience to dig myself out of most situations and turned me into a "jack of all trades, master of none" (much like you describe yourself).

The medium company was a consulting firm so I got to work with other companies of varying sizes (including government organizations). Having worked multiple roles for a number of organizations, I gained the breadth but not depth. I was exposed to internal policies and workings of these organizations without having to actually switch jobs that many times.

When I joined the large company I brought with me the benefit and knowledge of having worked with multiple orgs, which is something that was lacking at the time for the teams I worked with. Having worked here a few years, I've gained invaluable knowledge I wouldn't have gotten at small firms. Being a large global organization I get to work with vastly different cultures and experiences, all of which is an overall benefit to me.

Having a variety of experience will make you well rounded. You will have positive and negative takeaways which you can apply in your future roles. And who knows, you may actually enjoy the large corporate life.

Is the grass greener at big companies? It entirely depends on what you are looking for and your personality. Is it valuable? Absolutely. Anyone who says otherwise is closing themselves off to invaluable experience.

I worked as a self taught software engineer for over the last decade starting from junior and climbing my way to seniority at small startups, some where I was the first engineering hire, some where I was employee #30-50. Last year for the first time I made the jump to BigCo for the first time. I am seriously loving it. People are more professional. Surprisingly diversity is higher IMO - startups can easily become culture fit clubs as they try to build a brand.

Here’s my ranking

1) working at YOUR OWN startup/for yourself

2) working at big co

3) working at a startup owned by someone else

I had a serious sense of FOMO after working at startups throughout my 20s. In my early 30s I joined a FAANG company and absolutely hated it, left FAANG after a year and came back to startups. There are some really interesting processes that these companies use, but the problems that they have aren't broadly applicable to startups so it's not so much about "the right way" as it is about "their way". However, if you really want to try it there's very little downside. I found it pretty easy to jump from a FAANG back into startups and now I can sell "that I've seen both sides" when interviewing / managing.

I worked in a startup for my 2nd serious job in Canada, and it was a mess.

The company burned through $7 mills, and went under in under a year. Such a mess. I will never ever work for a startup again.

If I owned that company, I would've already recouped the money many times over.