&gt; I am very wary about claims like those from the article about how working for a lower salary at startups will allow you to somehow compress N years of career experience into (N-k) years of actual work.<p>That claim has never made any sense to me (I think I first saw pg make it). In my experience, there&#x27;s little to no practical difference between working as a developer at most startups and doing the same at a bigcorp in terms of experience. There&#x27;s certainly a lot of rah-rah-rah about the &quot;startup culture&quot;, but places like Google try very hard to make their employees happy as well.<p>There might be a little more cowboy coding at the startup and a little more bureaucracy at the bigcorp (though it&#x27;s a good manager&#x27;s job to shield engineers from that bureaucracy), but your future job prospects are almost always better when you&#x27;ve got a bigcorp stint on your resume.