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A comment on Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad. Parent comment

Re:Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad by enjo on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @12:29PM (#19626282)
Yes startups will give you more responsibility, but that comes at the cost of far less mentorship. I often wonder if people only feel like they're growing faster at startups because the results are a bit more visible.

It is true that it's easier to be stagnant as an associate at a larger company. If you're not interested in taking on new challenges you can generally sort of fall through the cracks. However, folks who are proactive at a FAANG style company can find great mentors and support to develop skills really quickly. Often skills that simply aren't available to people at startups...

What's more valuable: spending your formative years working on systems at really high scale, or building a quick RoR MVP and managing 3 VM's in AWS for a startup?

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Re:Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad by fjp on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @12:49PM (#19626505)
You're not taking into account when the larger company simply won't allow you to to work on X because you're not the right team, title or level.

You may never get to manage a cloud VM. You will probably never get to help decide how a CI build pipeline works, how engineering hiring should work, etc etc.

I'm not discounting your point about learning to develop software at scale, but your overall scope of responsibility is much narrower. It's a tradeoff.

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Re:Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad by arcticbull on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @01:45PM (#19627058)
You won't get to do those things at BigCo likely until you've done it at a startup.
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Re:Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad by rhizome on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @01:25PM (#19626858)
* If you're not interested in taking on new challenges you can generally sort of fall through the cracks.*

BigCo titles are much more narrowly defined, so most of the time you can't even see the parts that might have new challenges...or cracks.

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Re:Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad by pickle-wizard on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @05:19PM (#19628889)
It depends. When I was at IBM I worked on a small team and we had about 4000 VMs/systems I was the Network Guy, the Storage Guy, the VMware Guy, the Windows Guy, the Linux Guy, the AIX guy, the AS/400 guy, and the Security Guy. Gees now that I think about it, no wonder I was so stressed out back them.

I learned a lot from that job and it opened a lot of doors for me in my career.

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