‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Computer Science Students

Re:‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Comp... by tombert on Thursday November 15, 2018 @04:54PM (#18463804)

As someone who has worked for five separate startups, I have to disagree. While you do get close to your teammates, in my experience the managers in startup-land tend to be a lot less flexible because they have their vision of how something is supposed to be done.

I work for a giant evil megacorporation now, and I honestly feel like I have more freedom here to explore new stuff than I ever did as a JS/PHP/GOLANG/MONGODB Ninja/Rockstar/Guru in startup land.

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Re:‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Comp... by avinium on Thursday November 15, 2018 @05:03PM (#18463875)

It's an interesting dynamic. BigCo doesn't live or die by a single employee or customer, so they can afford for devs to explore tech/ideas/etc.

But in terms of actually commercializing/releasing something, there's so many hoops to jump through that good ideas simply get stifled.

Startups are the opposite - they can ill afford a developer spending a week learning NewStack, but if someone floats an idea that fits (or improves) their business model, they can execute in the blink of an eye.

As with most things in life, there's pros and cons to both.

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Re:‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ Say Some Comp... by pj_mukh on Thursday November 15, 2018 @05:02PM (#18463859)

Worked at 3 startups and 2 mega-corps and had the absolute opposite experience.

The only time a manager at a startup was trying to stringently manage me was when he was hired from a mega-corp. Lot of startups make that mistake.

For me, startups still remain the best place to explore new technologies and capabilities (incl. personal upskilling) under a deadline (as opposed to personal projects).

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