Ask HN: What are the big differences working at a startup, bigco, old smallco?
Over 20 years in the workforce, here&#x27;s my notions from working for:<p>3 big-corps (over 30,000 employees each)<p>- Huge well organized career ladder<p>- lots of corporate resources for growing a career<p>- more possible to change jobs without changing companies, usually through changes in divisions<p>- good places to move up title-wise between smaller companies<p>- work tends to be more specialized, you&#x27;ll end up doing really only one kind of work and if you want to do something else you need to change jobs internally<p>- less flexibility and personal touches<p>- benefits are usually pretty good<p>- you will be not much more than a number to the higher organizational units in the company<p>- can get you positioned to work on hugely impactful work that will affect millions of people<p>- time to impact can be very long...<p>- tend to be very bottom-line focused and conservative<p>- lots of processes and procedures<p>- as a performer, lower stress, as you move up management ranks gets medium stressed<p>- may be a dozen or more layers between the lowest employee and the CEO<p>- hiring and recruiting is a well oiled machine<p>- these companies decide where they want to be and simply put muscle behind to make it happen<p>1 med-corp (&lt; 2,000 employees)<p>- definitely some aspects of working for a big-corp, mostly bureaucratic nonsense<p>- they&#x27;re trying <i>really</i> hard to become a big-co so more flexibility and risk taking is possible<p>- jobs tend to be less specialized in some cases<p>- less opportunity to move around, but you&#x27;ll also find that these are the places with 20+ year employees<p>- tend to have better benefits in order to attract talent from big-co, but can&#x27;t always match on pay (often in denial about the state of the market)<p>- feels like several small-corps (~100) in practice due to divisional structure, even the lowest employee is only 5-6 steps from the CEO<p>- most tasks are 1-5 people deep, so if one person isn&#x27;t good, they can usually scrounge up another person who can take it on<p>- recruiting is functional, but thin<p>- growth desires can sometimes get in the way of sustaining operations<p>1 small-corp (~100)<p>- I didn&#x27;t actually have a good experience at this place, so I may be colored by it<p>- there&#x27;s often more people available to take on specialized tasks, but still lots of multi-hat wearing<p>- most tasks are 1 person deep, so if they aren&#x27;t good, the entire company feels it and grinds to a halt<p>- very easy to get overwhelmed picking up slack for less capable staff<p>- everybody knows everybody<p>- organizational &quot;feel&quot; will be deeply linked to the personality of the C-level execs, they&#x27;ll know you by name and have a reputation for you in their mind<p>- a good size to put behind one major product push, or 5-6 small ones, but might be too few people to handle<p>- are often in the middle of huge growth which means everything is in chaos<p>6 tiny-cos (&lt;20 staff)<p>- imagine every kind of job there is, welcome to doing all of them, often at once<p>- in terms of professional capacity, I grew the most in these kind of companies (while career titles grew the most in big-corps)<p>- if you have a good team, can be extremely rewarding<p>- better than 90% chance that things will go bust and you&#x27;ll experience hours and stress unlike anything you can imagine<p>- everybody is customer support and sales<p>- absolutely no room not to pull your own weight<p>- company direction is dictated almost entirely by the capabilities of just a handful of core people...who may not even be the C-levels or founders<p>- work should be very focused on getting an MVP out the door and getting initial customers, then moving up to the next size<p>- often are getting ready to grow very fast which can be very tough<p>- everything is always in chaos, but you have huge impact on the company almost every day<p>- I love working in these places, but can&#x27;t do them back to back, the stress is crippling