[lemmsjid]

I've been doing startups since 2001, with brief stints at larger places due to acquisitions, and then a sojourn at a FAANG. Something that irritated me well before Hacker News existed, and manifested as Hacker News came into being, was the performative nature of startups. By that I mean all the boxes that startup founders would tick in order to be seen as a 'real' startup. This would create an excessive focus on superficial aspects of a company's culture: things like open plan offices, underpaying employees to keep them 'hungry', employees work 24/7 churning out code... In my own experience I never saw these things actually improving a startup's output. And along side that were many experiences of actual employee exploitation: promising employees the moon on equity by obfuscating their actual stake, shaming employees who did not conform to the founder's superficial sense of a productive programmer, etc.

I believe there is a lot more cynicism around now, because we're several decades into the whole startup thing, and such cynicism is often a good thing. Employees are way more savvy about looking into a startup's finances, business practices ( so many startups were built around the idea that regulations didn't actually exist...), and work culture before listening to the company's hype.

Not to mention that in my large company stints I encountered many people whose work ethic I found admirable. Really the difference between a startup and a large company in my experience, and the reason I prefer startups, is quite simply that startups are not large enough to experience the inevitable communication/hierarchy issues that come up when any group of homo sapiens becomes sufficiently large. I tend to get lost in my work and will work most of my waking hours, and that often isn't even possible at a large company because of the cross team orchestrations, while a typical startup has a big pile of things you can simply dive into individually and solve. You certainly can do that at a large company if you look for things to do, but I like my work to have measurable impact as well.