[dasil003]

I really enjoyed your article. It clearly contains a lot more wisdom than Suster's. Still, I think you underestimate how little one can learn in a big company. It all depends what team you land on and who your manager is, and it can be a huge crapshoot. At least at a startup you have a guarantee that the company needs to focus on fundamentals and you will never be chastised for thinking about the business case for what you are doing (obviously this is not strictly true, but those kinds of startups tend to die fast). At a big company you may be assigned to a team doing something irrelevant that exists purely for political reasons. Your boss is as likely as not to be [Gervais Principle] clueless and the only thing you learn is corporate politics. That might help your earning potential down the road, but it won't make you a better engineer. Sure if you get on the AWS team at Amazon or work at Google or Facebook you get an opportunity to work with tech that a startup could never lay their hands on, but those jobs are hardly the corporate average.

You're right that it's no justification for taking a poor package at a startup, but I think the median startup job is much better than the median corporate job in terms of engineering education.