[johan_larson]

The advice in this article would make a lot more sense if the title were "Why You Should Found a Startup at Least Once", because working for a startup as an employee, even a fairly early employee, really isn't all that different from working for a larger company. There are more changes in direction, that's all. But you're not the one calling the shots on the changes, so whatever.

(I've worked as a junior employee for two startups, one about a year in with ~10 employees and the other about five years in with ~100 employees.)

[prostoalex]

> because working for a startup as an employee, even a fairly early employee, really isn't all that different from working for a larger company

How so? Typically with a large company an engineer is exposed to a variety of stakeholders, such as other engineers, designers, DBAs, product managers, project managers, program managers, engineering managers with more or less clearly defined roles.

At a startup a bunch of those roles are usually conflated, and without prior experience during the growth phase it's pretty hard to make a statement like "we need to hire a project manager, we're spending too much time on ad hoc project management" or "it's time to add a product manager into the team, product is becoming too big to be managed via email/chat".

Without exposure to such clarity of roles, most of the teams just go with the flow, passively-aggressively protesting the amount of busywork that's suddenly their responsibility.

[johan_larson]

In the smaller startup I worked in, there was already a formal hierarchy. We had a VP of Engineering, two lead engineers, and what amounted to a QA lead and a data architect. And all engineers worked mostly in their own areas of responsibility and expertise.

The difference was that most of these senior people did quite a bit of grunt work that in a larger organization would have been delegated. The VP did a lot of program manager work and the leads did a lot of design and development, since they only had a couple of subordinates each.

But because the roles and hierarchies were established, it was usually clear whose responsibility it was to make any particular decision. We had on paper a formal organization suitable for a much larger team. We could have telescoped out to three times the number of engineers without adding any more senior people; the leads and VP would just have spent more time on leadership duties and less on direct implementation. I suspect the presence of the formal hierarchy was why the organization felt very mature.

Are things different in other companies of the same size?

[radmuzom]

So true. I fell into the trap of believing that working at a startup would be extremely beneficial to me as a fresher. That was the worst career decision I made, consequences of which I need to bear even till today. Meanwhile, I see multiple acquaintances who started working for large companies, gained some reputation and network and are doing well as startup founders or as leaders in startups (well paid, lot of authority) now.