[guelo]

At a startup you'll have way more responsibility and be making decisions at a much higher level than at bigcorp. You'll learn way more, move much faster, wear more hats. It's not even close. That mentor will put you on some narrow meaningless tasks, especially if you have some talent because then he'll be afraid of you. I'd advise the opposite, go startup when you're young and have less to risk and more to prove. If you have the energy and the talent you can run circles around the big guys.

[gedrap]

>>> You'll learn way more, move much faster, wear more hats.

That's true. However, you lose the 'have you thought about doing it in X way?' 'would have never thought of that' thing. There are advantages in wearing more hats but you absolutely must make sure that you constantly get some ideas from outside (blogs, friends, books, etc).

>>> if you have some talent because then he'll be afraid of you

If one engineer is afraid of other, that's an indicator of a toxic workplace. If it's the senior who's afraid because of someone much less experienced... He's probably not that senior anyway and definitely not a good mentor.

>>> If you have the energy and the talent you can run circles around the big guys.

It's not all black and white. Both have their pros and cons, as simple as that.

[eropple]

I consult for companies from ten-person startups to a few thousand employees, and, from my perspective, it's all the same thing. While everybody pretends their particular organization size and type is supreme, it all comes out in the wash. Sure, startups move marginally faster. The time for reflection and self-analysis is lesser and most people seem to get less out of what they do, learn less from their mistakes, have generally poorer leadership that can't devote the time to helping more inexperienced employees learn the lessons they should learn from those mistakes and help them grow both as practitioners of a craft and as human beings.

And I'm gonna be honest: the assumption that a mentor has fear-based motives for ensuring that your work has greater benefits than the risk it poses is so utterly unrelated to reality in the general case, so monstrously projective and in itself pathologically fear-based, that I have trouble believing somebody would state it in good faith as such a universality. (To the newbie: your highly-self-regarded work is risky. Unknown commodities are always risky. If you are not analyzing your actions as a leader through the lens of risk, you are a bad leader. Many startups don't do this. They have bad leaders, too. But the understanding of and formalization of this is not something taught to entry-level employees at that move-fast-die-fast startup, because all too often, nobody else knows about it either.)

This is not to say that there are not startups where one can learn and thrive, because obviously they exist in some proportion. I would say, and the failure rates of startups and the it-was-my-first-job candidates I've seen ejected from the crashing wrecks strongly push me in this direction, that it certainly seems significantly harder to learn how to be directed and effective (as opposed to thrashy and high-effort) in such an environment. But it's certainly possible. Nor would I say that there isn't a very good time to leave a big company--I bailed two years to the day and probably stayed six months longer than I needed to in order to be a good engineer rather than a good coder.

But there is no generalization that holds, in either direction, as universally as your post asserts, and the assumption of such is foolish.

[csixty4]

> At a startup you'll have way more responsibility and be making decisions at a much higher level than at bigcorp.

LOL. Seriously LOL. Literally laughing out loud and people are staring at me.

We've worked for some VERY different startups. At the last startup I worked for, I couldn't even choose whether my monitor was rotated to portrait or landscape mode. The co-founder changed it to the "better" mode for me.