[strlen]

couple more things: did you like the people who interviewed at either position? did you get to meet the team? in the end it's the people you work with that you learn from the most. there are office-space like environments in big companies and there are highly dynamic environments in big companies; there are start-ups run by clueless wantaprenuer (sp?) business-types (where you'll just be expected to crank out low quality PHP code 80 hours a week) and there are truly innovative start-ups.

ignore the name of the company and the title, focus on the content of your work and the people you will be working with.

my first job out of college was doing operations at yahoo: i ended up learning a tremendous amount on the job and was almost hunted by a start-up who came across me. my first real job (prior to college, junior year of high school) was doing similar work at start-up: the pay wasn't great and i ended up losing the job after the dot-com crash (which gave me a chance to go to college) but i got to work on real and interesting projects on the job which i could put on my resume and talk about at my yahoo! interview. the reason i mention my experiences is that big companies offer unique challenges (at yahoo it was a truly massive scale growing at an immense rate) and name recognition; smaller companies, on the other hand, are more able to take risks and put you on high responsibility projects that will also teach you a great deal.

lastly don't over think your decision and don't worry too much about making the wrong one. once you've made one stick with it and don't think too much of "what if i chose the other way". i am quite guilty of not following this advice (over thinking and going back and forth on decisions, regretting previous decisions, worrying too much about the future) and that has cost me a great deal of sleep, productivity and happiness. you're fresh out of college, this is the perfect time to make mistakes (whether it's joining a start-up that may end up tanking or going nowhere, or joining a company that you may end up leaving in a year due to lack of challenge).

[deathbob]

First of all, I don't know anything about python, my first experience with it was doing the django tutorial last week. The small firm said they use python specifically because they found PHP programmers to be so different in level of skill, and that python programmers were consistently pretty high. I can't vouch for any of that, but to me, it does say that they're concerned about hiring good people and not just anybody. The owner/founder has an active development role so I'm thinking he's not too much of a "clueless wantaprenuer". Hopefully :)