from Hacker News

Why you should join a big company first

by bmj1 on 9/4/13, 10:11 PM with 82 comments

• by pg on 9/4/13, 11:04 PM

  I used to advise people to go work for an existing company for a few years before trying to start their own, but I now think that was bad advice. It's true that you learn things working for a big company, but you learn more, faster, starting your own.

  A lot of people we've funded have said they wished they'd quit their corporate job sooner. I don't remember any saying they wished they'd stayed in it longer.

  The one point in this article that's valid is the last one. Startups take over your life. So if you want to focus on other things besides work, you're better off with a regular job than trying to start a startup.

• by peter_l_downs on 9/4/13, 10:49 PM

  The article opens with the question:

      > “Should I join Microsoft or a startup?”
  

  but really seems to answer the question:

      > "Should I join Microsoft or start a startup"
  

  which is really very different.

• by bmj1 on 9/4/13, 10:49 PM

  This really resonated with me, I was one of those cocky, over-achieving kids who thought I could start a company fresh out of college.

  Instead, I've worked in Product for 26 months and learnt some really good skills: how to write real requirements, how to manage expectations (up and down), how to negotiate, how to measure and to focus on moving the needle, how to build a GTM plan and execute against it, how to deal with fireman issues, how to develop with a SOA, the list goes on.

  And picked up a bunch of payments industry expertise along the way.

  I'm still determined to start my own business, but definitely a hell-of-a-lot more confident in my chances of success.

• by nostromo on 9/4/13, 11:17 PM

  This attitude is Seattle's m.o. and I think it's unfortunate.

  Recently I was talking with a CS advisor at the UW, my alma mater, and "corporate first, startup later" seems to be their default advice to students. His advice gave me the impression the UW was now a staging ground for Microsoft and Google lifers. Contrast this with Stanford's embracing of early entrepreneurship and risk-taking, and you get a sense for what makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley.

• by kemiller on 9/4/13, 11:04 PM

  Yep. If I had it to do over, I'd do it that way. The options are better now, though. 15 years ago, if you wanted a big software company you had Microsoft, and, uh... Sun? Oracle? Now you have Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, not to mention the in-betweeners like Square, Dropbox, and Github. It's an incredible time to be starting off in Software. Unless you're sitting on the idea of the century (hint: probably not) it's not a bad idea to accumulate up cash, pay off debt, and build a great network.

• by ojbyrne on 9/4/13, 10:49 PM

  This is clearly from a business perspective.

  But if you're an engineer, I personally think that working for a big _software_ company early in your career is important. It's just plain easy to work on software in a small company because you don't have legacy code, existing products, existing customers, existing practices. Also you have no real way to judge whether your code is good or bad until its come under the glare of experienced engineers.

  Also, people shouldn't take any of Robert Scoble's advice.

• by pdenya on 9/4/13, 10:47 PM

  I believe big companies are a good route for most devs early in their careers but most of the bullet points about why big companies are helpful are only applicable for senior team members. For junior people almost all of these would be faster/easier to accomplish at a startup where you've negotiated for more salary/less equity.

• by Ologn on 9/5/13, 1:00 AM

  > You learn how (and how not) to run your own business—on someone else’s dime.

  I have worked everywhere from startups where I was hired employee #1 to Fortune 50 companies. Odds are your own business will start small. You learn about how to run your own business when you sit 20 feet from the CEO and the sales team and finance and HR and marketing etc. You don't learn as much about how to run a company when you are the company's 104th Java programmer in that particular city. Maybe at a big company you learn about their particular, complex procedure that it takes to change one line of production code.

• by dicroce on 9/4/13, 10:47 PM

  Couldn't agree with this more. I worked at startups first, and I think I would have been much better off getting a decent amount of experience under my belt first.

• by wil421 on 9/4/13, 11:27 PM

  Recently I graduated from college and decided to go for a big multinational company with employees all over the globe and customers also. The reasons I chose to do so are similar to the ones the author chose.

  Some drawbacks so far are the politics it takes to get a project going and the maze of people in a large corporation. Many times it takes several meetings just to find the right person to answer a question. Also having to interface with people around the globe to get sign off on things pose a time zone conflict and more hours are wasted.

  Sometimes the answers to the problems that I face are not known to one side of the business because they have no idea how the other side does things. There are massive silos of information and systems that make it harder to navigate than a smaller shop.

• by parris on 9/4/13, 11:37 PM

  I feel like getting a job at a larger company as an engineer is easier than getting a job at a startup anyways. Sure when you start your own thing there are no rules, but any startup with a couple senior engineers that have had to train up some employees from scratch know how much work it is. If you are joining a large company then you have a better opportunity to learn from more people. Your support base is larger.

  Side note: who can you actually hire within your network if you join/start a startup? I thought I knew people, but every time I've ever asked if anyone wants a referral for (enter reputable startup brand here using awesome tech) I get no responses among my network. Every good engineer I know right now actually has a job that they like.

• by beachstartup on 9/4/13, 11:25 PM

  the experience i had in large-company life (ages 21-25) gave me the confidence to dump a large amount of personal money into my startup. if i didn't know it was possible to make decent money at such an early age, i would have been scared to death. to me it was no big deal.

  in retrospect it was a pretty brave/risky thing to do, but it didn't feel like it at the time. money came, money went. simple as that.

  to a certain extent, i feel the same way now. if everything went to hell tomorrow, i could just get a job and probably earn in the neighborhood of $150k/year on salary.

  we, the founders, have 100% ownership of our company, which is profitable and growing at approximately 75-100% a year.

  5 years spent in megacorp life versus seeking funding and giving up ownership was well worth it.

• by dsugarman on 9/4/13, 10:54 PM

  if you aren't willing to take risk right out of college, not even a midlife crisis will be enough to motivate you to build something great

• by null_ptr on 9/4/13, 11:18 PM

  I think more and more young talented developers choose to work for small cool companies or even attempt to start their own, instead of choosing to be a cog at a corporate giant. And this probably has the giants worried.

  It's true that corporate experience is useful, but it can also cause depression and frustration, seeing your youth fleeting while you implement inconsequential features and fix trivial defects in a mammoth project you couldn't possibly be more emotionally detached from.

  Get out as soon as it makes sense and not a moment later.

• by kangaroo5383 on 9/4/13, 11:54 PM

  Joining a big company has many benefits such as being able to see what leads to bureaucracy in order to avoid it, meet at least one awful manager so you will never be like that person, meet at least one amazing mentor and grow, and learn see beyond appearance to recognize truly skilled/smart people vs. overconfident fakers. I think many of these skills are necessary for building a successful company and the relationships formed at these companies are invaluable.

• by sergiosgc on 9/4/13, 11:07 PM

  The time window for playing the startup game is very short. Fresh out of college you don't have as many financial responsibilities as a few years down the road. Take that financial freedom as a license to risk working at or launching a startup.

  You won't be able to do it when you have a mortgage, two kids to feed and clothe, and college savings on the horizon.

• by Steko on 9/4/13, 10:49 PM

  Great article, but as usual I'm put off by how the headline frames this as universal advice, a practice that's reached epidemic proportions in blogging. If this comment were a post on my blog, I might call it "Shooting people who frame their advice as universal and why you need to do it"

• by bippi on 9/4/13, 11:16 PM

  I don't know that startup vs. big matters as much as small vs. big. If you can work for a profitable small company where you matter and you wear many many hats, you will be far better prepared to make an impact on your own if/when you do start your own company.

• by Apocryphon on 9/4/13, 11:09 PM

  What really is a startup, these days? A handful of hackers in a garage or a co-working space? Somewhere established but still youthful and fresh- Path? Square? Quora? Someplace much older but with a sense of dynamism and a startup ethos- Google? Apple?