[GeneralMayhem]

I always trust sites dedicated to getting people jobs at startups to tell the honest truth about what it's like to work at a startup.

I work for a large corporation, and almost every single negative thing listed here is false. The main one that's not (and I'm not sure this is even really a negative) is the high risk/low upside - I'll be quite comfortable here, but I'll never be pulling down millions in a year as I would if I struck it rich with a startup I owned. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure only a few dozen people actually make millions from startups.

Oh, and "essential vs. substitutable" - everyone is substitutable. It doesn't matter if you're employee #2 or employee #10002, you're replaceable. Actually, that one amusingly contradicts the generalist vs specialist one - you would think specialists that know the domain would be a lot harder to replace than the "generalist" who's spinning up the world's 8 billionth MEAN stack, but then that would require the source to have a little self-awareness.

[vkjv]

This. Although, in my experience it's more relative to team size than company size. I work on a fairly small engineering team within a large apparel company and it seems to match the bullet points for start-ups more closely.

[superplussed]

One important point is that because large corporations often try to emulate the culture of startups (and never the other way around), if you try to make an article contrasting the two cultures you are inevitably going to miss the mark on your description of large corporations. Essentially you are trying to describe a divergence when much of the world is seeking a convergence between the two.

[Mengue]

Thanks a lot for your comment.

Having worked for both, large corporations (Google, GE, BCG) as well as startups between 3 and 300 employees, we are purely speaking from our own experiences (as mentioned on the bottom of the article).