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The autonomy part you mentioned is something that I forgot about, but that's definitely a very important point as well: from what I've known, there is a huge limit on what you're allowed to do in a bigger environment. There are a risk of learning things that you might not like -- of course, I've never worked in one, so takes it with a cup of salt. Personally for me, the other thing is that I like to learn a lot of things, and I just figure that whether now or a few years from now (when I'm "Senior Developer"), there would be just as much things to learn about. I figure it's just better to learn how to learn and get people to teach you stuffs without being in the same work place. Another thing is that leadership skill is different than tech skill, which is also different than "technical leadership" skill, and this is back to the whole autonomy thing: I got a chance to try my ability to cram the idea that "not everything in a language need to be used" to the js guy, or telling the Java guy "may be we will just decide to rewrite our ORM with another library and putting up 5 layer of abstractions could potentially help us do that" is not a sound idea. Engineering skill set seems to be distinct from coding skill, which I'm not sure will qualify in the usual sense of "technical skill" or not, since you can't put "good variable and function naming" on your CV. Believe it or not, working with really bad code forced me to come back to first principle and ask question like "why should we use function", which I don't think you will have the chance to do in a bigger code base? There are also benefits from working closer to the business: you learn what actually is important, and what is crap. Of course, all of this would apply if you join another startup ... and I don't mean for any of this to be an advice or anything, more of a commiserating comment. I can't really put my email here. But since you and some others are on their main account, do you mind if I have a way to contact you? I just want to follow up a few months from now to see your decisions. |