* It is far more likely that your pre-cash-flow-positive startup is going to die, abruptly, with no severence, than it is that NYSE Euronext or Coca Cola is going to cut 1000 IT jobs.

* If you can hack it in a startup, you are worth enough that finding another job isn't going to be hard. If you're doing it right, you're always going to have another job in your back pocket.

A point that this "debate" often misses: just because you're doing a bigco career doesn't mean you get to be lazy. You have to actively manage your career either way. The debate between startup life and parking your ass in the same cube for 15 years is a straw man argument.

When you go for the next job interview do you want to say.

I was developing Rails apps to link facebook to Xbox for iPhone users. Or

I was a level 3.2 group manager responsible for coordinating all inputs from level 3.3 staff and collating them for level 3.1s ! And I have technical experience writing macros in XYZ running in our custom ABC billing system.

So, let me respond. What looks better on a resume:

"I was developing Rails apps to link Facebook to Xbox for iPhone users", or

"I designed, implemented, and successfully deployed the first 3 revisions of Instant Bloomberg for Bloomberg, which provided IM capabilities to everyone with a BB terminal".

Because Bloomberg is notorious for crappy 3.2-group-manager-of-GS-integration-backend-foo-XYZ development jobs, but I have a couple friends who got to do Instant Bloomberg.

Talking about strawman, crappy startups and startups aren't synonymous either.

When you also consider that the same large company took one look at my skillset and responsibilities and promptly doubled my salary post acquisition, it's not nearly as clear what the downside is.