|
From my experience, lots of great things: stability, great compensation, a never ending supply of technical challenges, products to work on that huge numbers of people use ("oh you work on that? I use that every day!"), a well defined technical career progression path, plenty of personnel depth and financial cushion to do things slowly (so you aren't ever up all night live coding against prod to keep the systems up and the business from going under), a strong engineering culture with more focus on code quality / maintainability (related to the financial cushion and also the default assumption that code will live for a long time), easy to hire good engineers so you aren't constantly strapped for talent, ... probably some more things that I'm missing. And lots of bad stuff: the communication burden of wrangling huge numbers of people, bad decisions by leadership that you're helpless to impact, just the general difficulty of having one's values align perfectly with those of a big shareholder controlled faceless blob, figuring out what to work on that will be both satisfying and aligned with the right peoples' goals (that is, fun coding projects are often not impactful while thankless slogs are, at least for more senior folks), etc.; essentially, the politics are harder to navigate and feel satisfied with. To highlight my first two positive points: the stability and compensation has allowed me to pay down all our debt, buy a house (recently refinanced to a 15 year mortgage), save up a year of expenses, allow my wife to go back to school, and pay for a couple kids to be in a lovely daycare. Most of that would have been much more difficult in my previous life in the startup world. I'm very happy I got the job (when I was about your age), but I also think often about leaving it. Hope that helps! |