[larsberg]

There's another thing you should take away from this article: if all you want to do is work on really hard technical problems, be well compensated, and never have to worry about managing people and career-limited for it, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google are all great places to do that. Having sat on the other side of the hiring wall from the author -- as a manager doing hiring of developers at Microsoft -- I found that college students who had gone off to a startup for several years often had gained some breadth (product knowledge, used/configured more types of systems, etc.) but had failed to gain much real technical depth.

I take a little bit of issue with his characterization of risk at these big companies. I don't know anyone working at any of those companies who hasn't experienced feature or product cancellation at some point in their career. Well, except for a couple of guys who've worked on debuggers and text editors for their entire 15+-year careers, but those are special cases :-)