[poshj]

I have been working part-time in fairly fast paced Japanese startup, and next year I graduate and choose to enter a company in research area. My decision is mainly because of culture and demand from my parents (the type of parents that ask you why you work at home instead of applying to "real" company like IBM, etc). One will learn more in area that suit him, no matter it's a startup or a company's research laboratory. One thing for sure before you make the decision is that you have to know exactly what you're going to do/face and whether you're going to like it. I learned a lot from startup but I felt that you don't get much time to learn deeply about new concepts and implement them. In startups, you get limited budget, limited devs team and basically you don't have enough time to implement/test new ideas. The most important factor for me is: since I'm not the kind of top level coder who knows everything, I feel insecure working at startup with lack of assistance from someone who really knows what they're doing.