Startup vs Stable
I have seen lots of people joining startup for 2 main reasons - Pay & learning. I am fine with people joining just for pay (depends on person), but little skeptical with the "learning" aspect. Having 10 years of experience, I have worked for both Startup & Stable companies. Currently we see hardly any startup being actually profitable/sustainable. So the tech solutions applied mostly deal with the short-term profit and growth. This often result in over-engineered solutions and unnecessary tools being used. Again, it's not that what we learn in startup is waste. But would you rather learn building long-term sustainable software or short-term with unreasonable user-base? Open to be corrected here!!
I don't exactly get what you mean, but I'll share what I understand. Startups are very fast, they don't wait for protocols. So it may happen that I will acquire the same knowledge in 6 months in a startup, while someone else in a big stable company will learn that same knowledge in 1 year. Now I don't care if the startup crashes in 9 months. I am more skilled and employable at the 9 month mark than someone in a stable company learning at a less steep pace
That’s exactly my point.. you definitely learn, no doubt about it.. but question is , does that learning really useful for building stable long term product? What you learned in those 6 months would be useful in building similar software.. and then you would turn to another one and then another one..
This might also be causing mentality of not sticking with one company
Same can be said for the other side as well. If you're working in a big stable company, most of your work will be bug fixes/rewrites/migrations etc, with very small visibility and impact in overall context. So is it beneficial long term or do you get restricted to similar responsibilities where everything is already built and working and you just make small upgrades. This is also more a question about the individual's skillset rather than the company. Many people are able to change their output/workstyle based on the requirements (like 0-1 stage or fortune 500 stage), while some can't. If one is able to change, they'll get a bigger pool of opportunities, compared to ones who can't
Startup product release cycles are much shorter, so you work on and learn a lot of different areas and new tech in a short duration. This makes SWEs desirable for startups since they can hack their way through building functional products in a short time. However, at senior levels, understanding of sustainable architecture is important and you wouldn't learn that at a startup.
Stable company is not necessarily just bugs and maintenance.. it might be about building new features.. my main point is if you are not interested in long term product, then one might always be looking for new opportunities every 2-3 years (or maybe even 1 year for few people)..
one can ask themselves, should I continue in building stable product for long time or just build-switch-repeat