[muzani]

The paragraph right after that explains how startups can get ahead. I work with a lot of startups just for the learning opportunity and career progression. Even with the high probability of startup deaths, you can hit real manager experience, at the age of 30 and move on to manager jobs with big corporations.

[mmt]

That particular one, "career progression" only seems to apply to those who consider it a progression to move into management. That seems to be a minority opinion among engineers, but, more importantly, there are far fewer management roles than engineering ones, especially at a startup.

[muzani]

I was going to say that there's career progression towards being a 10x programmer too. But that's a much more debatable topic.

You get more flexibility to take on multiple roles. More pressure driving you forward. Much, much less bureaucracy to worry about. No more 2 month discussions over code that takes 2 weeks to write.

The downside is that you could get tied up putting out fires, being unfocused. And there's little room for deliberate training.

[mmt]

Indeed, all of this are debatable, and the article only specifically mentions "rise up through the ranks", which means management.

Of course, even that's a questionable proposition. It calls out the youth of a Chief Product Officer at Facebook, which may well be cherry-picking/selection-bias.

As I've researched the managers at startups I consider working for, I routinely see on LinkedIn profiles that a high "rank" at a startup turns into a much lower one when an individual moves to a much larger company, though it does tend to go back up once that individual returns to startup work.