[DavidSharff]

Are you able to compare the experience of being at a Big Tech company against a very small team with wide responsibilities?

I'm in my 11th year as a developer and left a pure tech company 6 years ago where I was surrounded by other engineers for a small one where I've been 1 of a 2 until this past year (I now lead a team of 3 stateside and nominally 3 more overseas).

Note for traditional startup folks: the lack of team growth may seem like an obvious signal of low performance. Fwiw - we're entirely self-funded and our revenue has grown by nearly 5x and total staff by 3-4x during that time.

From a career/skill growth perspective, I often wonder how being on my little island nets out against joining a larger elite team.

I've no doubt developed idiosyncrasies but I've also directly or collaboratively coded, designed, deployed, and promoted every piece of software, including several web products from scratch, that have been foundational to our success since the first year the company existed.

I really have no idea how to compare that experience with being a cog in a massive machine but surrounded by brilliant work and brilliant people I could learn from.

[angarg12]

I don't personally have experience with early stage startups so I can only talk second hand. I think both can provide growth in different ways.

Big Tech is more consistent and structured, while startups are sink or swim. I've seen people come in as Principal Engineers after building the entire product of a successful startup. But that happened because they joined a rocket ship as an early engineer, which is the programmer's equivalent of winning the lottery.

So if you can join a rocket ship by all means do it. Otherwise Big Tech is generally a safe bet.

[arinlen]

> Are you able to compare the experience of being at a Big Tech company compared to a very small team with wide responsibilities?

Most "Big Tech companies" are already structured internally as small teams with wide responsibilities, which imclude owning multiple projects and with it everything required to develop and deploy them.

If anything, "Big Tech companies" have enough resources available to allow developers to work without bothering with distractions.

[DavidSharff]

I think it's a good point that there are many more domains within large organizations than one might expect from the outside.

However, people are undoubtedly in more specialized roles and teams on the whole.

I'm merely trying to explore the differences in growth as a developer between the two extremes.

While I don't think as many people who build React interfaces at Facebook are also spending days creating Postgres schema diagrams and responding to mission criticial DevOps failures, I certainly grant that the small team varied project approach might be more similar than I realize.

In that case or either way, the most impactful difference in how personal growth is impacted may be the surrounding ecosystem and knowledge base.

In one scenario you are flush with existing infrastructure and the thoughtful people who designed or maintain it. This can focus your work as you mentioned and is also a great learning environment.

While on the other side you are working without a safety net slogging your way through creating everything* from scratch. This forces you to learn new skills in unfamiliar areas and managing all sorts of tradeoffs autonomously (there could be literally no one else to motivate you or to ask a question aside from your search bar).

* Infrastructure, tools, processes, etc. I'm not talking about reinventing the wheel though you are free to do so for your own pleasure or peril.