Actually, as an European (as in, in a completely different environment than SV), I&#x27;d recommend the opposite with a small tweak, add &quot;small company&quot; to the startup meaning.<p>Most big companies I&#x27;ve worked with in Europe have horrible new employee training package or no training at all. I haven&#x27;t worked in a single one that took fresh out of college types and allowed them to work in different departments. The most common scenario when a new graduate gets hired into a team doing X is to throw him in, get whatever documentation the team has, even maybe someone to ask questions and the expectation is that he will do X for the next few years.<p>Opposed to this is the environment in a small company&#x2F;startup, where you&#x27;ll be forced to do a bit of everything and even lend a hand with stuff that is not your job at all. You&#x27;ll have the chance to see different technologies, see the whole process end to end AND then, decide what you want to do.<p>BTW, is salary that important for people starting their careers? Salary advancement yes, even what salaries you might expect with 2&#x2F;5&#x2F;10 years of experience, of course. But for a first job? Does it matter that much?<p>My first salary was crap (600€&#x2F;month in the year 98), but allowed me to work in multiple environments (web, databases, sysadmin, embedded system...) and when the time came to look for a new place, allowed me more freedom to choose what I wanted to do (the biggest problem I had finding a job, in the middle of the .com crisis, was convincing employers that, yes, I had indeed worked with all those technologies in &#x27;only&#x27; 2.5 years). I multiplied by 5 my salary with that second job, which was a more than decent salary in the country at the time.