Recent new grad with two offers from security company and a big tech company. Startup company I'm currently interning at and learning a ton and seems like a lot of mentorship and guidance, but more work and longer commute. Tech stack is interesting. Clear internal issues. Other company I've interned at for the last two summers. Good culture and work life balance, but honestly don't think I'll learn as much. Any and all advice appreciated!
I would say it depends on what you’re optimizing for: learning or salary/prestige. Startups will give you a lot more hands on learning (more than you know what to do with) but will come with a lower salary and a higher risk of the company going under. Generally though, for new grads, I recommend startups first, and then leveraging that experience into a bigger position at a large company or into starting a company of your own. I’ve seen that work out really well for friends/coworkers.
I would recommend getting both startup and big company experience before you start your own. That way you know what not to do as you scale up.
I am assuming you are SDE since you mention tech company. I would recommend big company first, then startup. At big corp, you don't get to do much but you learn the right way to do things, from infrastructure to architecture, from code structure to db schema, and more. On the other hand, startup let's you take a lot of responsibilities and ownerships, but without the knowledge from big company, you won't be adding much values.
How's Zume pizza? Just curious.
I 100% agree to this statement. Being someone who’s worked only at startup since graduating college. You begin realizing there are a lot of holes in your knowledge. At the end of the day it’s easy to build something, but not knowing what are the advantages and drawbacks to your build architecture will only create busy work in the long run. Also developing good programmming habits are important to establish and are there for a reason. Bigger companies have already got it all figured out so you can easily learn from others people’s past mistakes. Why make the same mistakes as other people have already done? It’s a waste of time. Learn from them so you can move on to more interesting work. As I’m writing this, I’m reminded about how frustrated I am about myself. Sigh Long story short, don’t make the same mistake I did. As for me, I will soon be working for FAANG. Looking forward to all the positive and negatives of being at a company of this size. Peace
Try both within the first 5-10 years to see which one you like better. I don't think it particularly matters in which order. I worked at two FANG and now a startup. it's worked fine for me so far.
Oh if a pay cut is painful for you then go to a startup first.
Yeah I would agree with this. Started at F as new grad for two years, at startup now. I think it works out a lot better than going to a startup first (especially because a lot of decent startups won't hire new grads anyway). But most people will find it hard to give up the massive TC.
Do you want to build a product or a process? Think wisely. Either you become a small fish or a big fish. You'll get potentially paid more as the small fish, but you'll have more leverage as a big fish but at the cost of liquid income.
Early on try to pick the best Manager versus company. It makes a huge difference and that manager could be a mentor for a long time. If you your only going by company then startups will teach you more faster but it's crazier and you will work more. Larger companies teach you how it looks when its done right but it's also could be legacy way of doing things.
Big tech is you can
I would say big company first but make sure it’s a team that is at the core of the company, exploring and learning and not a niche team maintaining one old product. Ideally an infra / dev tools team at a big company. This will allow you to see how large scale systems should operate and need to operate. Then startups to apply your knowledge and experiment to see what you like and works. This is both from tech, culture and management style perspective. Then 10-12 years in go wherever. Your own startup, big company, series b startup. At this point you will have a lot of options and also know what you want.
Can talk about annoying things like comp ect if that helps