While you may think that people working big companies are wasting their potential, those working there might think the same for people at startups.
Let's explore a counter-argument:
At a big company you get incredible leverage for the work you do. Most large companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) don't bother with a few thousand clients. Your work goes out to millions. That's quite an impact you can have.
Startups on the other hand usually fail. And they fail after having affected relatively few customers. Very few ever make it to even tens of thousands of customers.
So which is is the bigger waste of human potential? The person working 80+ hours a week whose company goes bust after a year after being used by barely anyone or the person working 40 hours a week on a product being used by 100 million people?
Who is anyone on here to decide what grads should do with their potential, or whether they're wasting it? That's the height of arrogance, and I see no rationality whatsoever in such an attitude.
A more charitable interpretation of your parent's comment is the more general "X is a waste of your potential compared to Y, you should be doing Y." I would agree with you that startups are not automatically a better use of potential, but they might be for the particular person.
What ranks higher for me than "potential" (which is trickier for me to measure) is sanity. I can't see myself working at BigNonTechCo for 40 years doing more or less the same kind of activities, 40 hours each week. Other people can, that's for them, I'd go insane. Thus it's instrumentally rational for me to avoid such a place and rational for other people to seek it out.
Not working at a startup is a waste of human potential? You're going to have to elaborate on that, as that's extraordinarily disrespectful to pretty much everybody else in computing.
While you may think that people working big companies are wasting their potential, those working there might think the same for people at startups.
Let's explore a counter-argument:
At a big company you get incredible leverage for the work you do. Most large companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) don't bother with a few thousand clients. Your work goes out to millions. That's quite an impact you can have.
Startups on the other hand usually fail. And they fail after having affected relatively few customers. Very few ever make it to even tens of thousands of customers.
So which is is the bigger waste of human potential? The person working 80+ hours a week whose company goes bust after a year after being used by barely anyone or the person working 40 hours a week on a product being used by 100 million people?