I've always enjoyed working at small companies. I've worked at larger companies which have the "level" concept of employees, it's kindda funny to me now :)

In my experience at smaller companies you get treated better, you are a more significant factor to the overall success of the company and there is very little corporate crap which often has silly requirements that get justified by a mystical word of being "professional", which often actually seems to achieve the opposite of treating adults as bunch of kids that need to be managed and controlled :)

Though I know it also can go very bad for people in small companies that have mini dictators in charge.

>Though I know it also can go very bad for people in small companies that have mini dictators in charge.

By definition every company has a dictador. They might be "benevolent" and willing to delegate their power to some degree, but at the end of the day, they have the final say.

Even if the people are great, small (5-20 employee) companies often simply don't have scope for much career progression. You might have one layer of management between yourself and the company owner, so unless they start hiring or you plan on taking over the company, you can only be promoted once.

I have the same experience (worked for small companies, startups and FAANG).

At small companies you are working your ass off, and sometimes you'll get something in return - but mostly you'll just get a thankyou from some C-level or founder dude.

At FAANG I was getting a decent salary raise year after year (and a bigger bump through a promotion).

My raise at Amazon was about 4.5% (total after two years).

Of course they say it was 10% because of the way they take stock into account.

Not totally unfair, but still a kick in the pants when the bonus runs out and you see a thousand dollars a month less in your bank account.

Yeah except your promotion isn't usually a level, it's lead, manager, director, or chief. You leverage that and walk to a slightly larger company in that new role after a couple of years. Then rinse & repeat once or twice and you just shaved off years of slogging through the FAANGs.

After all of the above though, I would put 2-3 years in at a FAANG and then do whatever the heck I want.

FAANG == Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google

(First time I heard of it; had to look it up)

I feel like Netflix is only in there to make the acronym, does it really belong?

It's an odd collection, the others are tech giants yet there's no microsoft and netflix thrown in. Netflix is big but it's not Apple big.

It is a stock thing. All of those companies have well performing stocks.

Microsoft stock is up 80% in the last 2 years.

edit: and they are ahead of google in market cap again. Been going back and forth for the last little while.

The acronym I've heard is GAFAM: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft.

Judging by http://enwp.org/Largest_companies as of right now, the order should probably be AGMAF (Apple first) instead.

FAANG is usually used in the context of investments/stocks. These 5 have consistently been some of the highest growth tech stocks in the past couple of years.

AGAMF - Let's keep it dynamic and take the top 5 tech companies sorted by market cap.

Should be AMGAF right now.

This seems hard to keep accurate.

I'm sad nobody has done anything clever by changing G to A (for alphabet). E.g. AAA Companies

I saw it for the first time a few weeks ago, but with one "A" -- I guess Apple doesn't always count, maybe due to the much lower PE ratio?

Funny, it seems to have been coined in the US but I think I have seen it more in UK news sites.

<removed lame question>

We haven't installed Flash player.

I'm moving into year twenty of my career. I've done fairly long tenures at startups, culminating in a VP of Engineering role and subsequent acquisition by a Fortune 500 company. I'm now in the "big company" phase with a goal to bank $$$ via RSUs and then have a chance to go back to startups as a Founder/Co-Founder/CTO

True, but that relies on the company itself raising the level of work that it's doing to justify the title change. Coming from a small company with an inflated title just makes you look pretentious and silly.

I didn't think that needed to be said, and actually I think it's on you to make that happen at the company rather than the other way around.

Not really - If you managed a small team at a company, you've still got management experience. Bigger companies will recognize that regardless of title.

It's analog promotion, not digital, in a small company.

You gradually accumulate authority and responsibility over time. Payrises happen when you manage to convince the owner you need more money, rather than on a HR-managed pay scale. Eventually you'll get a new job title that reflects your current role.

Yeah, at the small companies I worked at, did ok but not crazy growth, the managers & above had been there for years and weren't going anywhere, so there was no place to get promoted into.

> paints small companies as some nirvana which is obviously not the case

Seconded. At least at big companies, they have defined procedures for promotions and departures (if for no other reason than to cover themselves legally). In small companies things can end up as unpredictable as middle-school politics (and about as mature).

Very true. From my experience as contractor I think bigger companies are often better and more predictable places to work. There are some small companies that are great but a lot of them don't pay well and are run by people who care only about themselves.

> From my experience as contractor

As a contractor you have essentially already taken a deal where you get paid a premium but have no expectation of career growth.

If you have no expectations of career growth at work then big companies are fantastic.

This was not about my career as contractor. It's what I saw how employees were treated. As I said some small companies are great and offer great opportunities but there are plenty that work their people to death, miss payroll, pay low salaries in exchange for a big dream that in most cases will never come true for the regular employee.

> This was not about my career as contractor.

My point is you have self selected into a group that doesn't expect career progression at work in the typical sense.

Surely that influences what you consider a "better" workplace?

> It's what I saw how employees were treated.

A big company can be "nice" and yet incredibly soul crushing.

I've had years of productive work thrown away over politics.

That's far more damaging, personally, than having to work some overtime or being under a bit more day to day stress.

I've had a year of productive work thrown away by a clueless and arrogant founder that didn't understand the product he was trying to build and the market and was blaming everyone but himself. So you can have the crazy overtime and the bad management that waste it all.

It's not really a question of big and small. Most companies are badly managed (or I am very unlucky). I found in big companies they at least know that making basic efforts to keep employees happy is profitable long-term.

> If you have no expectations of career growth at work then big companies are fantastic.

Pretty much.

You can end up in a spot where you can grow fast.

Or you can end up stagnating for years (me).

I'm still trying to figure out the whole small company scene.

I've mostly worked at large (>10k people), though not necessarily hot, tech companies with established tech ladders.

Now I'm working at a small (<500 people) SaaS company in a non-tech sector. While there are definitely some perks (including, oddly, better pay) I have some concerns directly related to the size of the company and the lack of a ladder:

First, lack of opportunity for specialization. People who reach the top of tech ladders are often genuinely capable specialists in some sub-discipline. One has to specialize to develop mastery. When done well, a tech ladder provides a useful framework within which to cultivate mastery.

The question becomes, how do you develop (transferable) mastery in an environment that isn't organized to exploit it? Partly I'm hoping that as the company grows, I can grow my skill set towards and expertise that the company will be prepared to use.

Second, when the company is small enough, it's still possible for founders/execs to interfere with even relatively mundane technical decisions. Now, I think the people I work for are quite competent, and I actually have gotten to know them (which wouldn't happen at a big company). I'm just saying that for small companies it can be hard for those at the top to let go of control and switch to a more delegated mode of decision making.

EDIT: fixed formatting

I am working at a small company (first job out of school) that is experiencing the growing pains you alluded to in your second point - management wanting to be involved in details across the entire stack, which hinders productivity.

I have no idea how to solve this problem, but the fact that you wrote about articulated it makes me think I'm not alone in my experience.

It has a name - micromanagement.

Yeah, the risk of small companies is that in order to change the scenery you have to leave. A sizable company (>250 people) in which people can move across teams is ideal, this is the main advantage of matrix management structures. Sad to hear about the leveling crap at Google et al. it is truly amazing how significantly HR policies can muck up a company by interfering with it's employees.

There's tons of articles and personal stories that shit on both small and large companies for various reasons, which leads me to believe it's not the size that matters, but the individual (or "view of the beholder").

not to mention that the difference in money can be life-changing. it is not uncommon to see a 2-3x total comp. multiple as a "level 3" at the referenced companies compared to a small one.

It shard to trust someone whose thesis is that the thing they know intimately is inferior to the thing they are unfamiliar with. The seaweed is always greener...

This was definitely my experience at 2/4 of the startups I worked at