Beginning your career, would you prefer a startup or a corporate job and why?

I landed in a company that's slightly above startup level but not a corpo. That means, we know what we're doing but don't have much hierarchy and there are no "managers" per se. Looks good, feels good, seems ideal for me.

Enterprise level institution, not exactly a corp.

For example: where i work is a school, it is enterprise but not really corporate like.

Its better that way, corps can get rid of you when they want, schools are more....er..nice? And normally let you build a career better.

Start up life for life

I strongly suggest going for corp.

Yes, it will be mostly legacy
Yes, processes are slow and frustrating

But boy am I freaking happy I've learned to deal with processes, responsibilities and escalations to make my and my team's life easier!!!

Latest example. EC2 instances (shared environments) have always been very flaky and sensitive to load. Monitoring was dying randomly on very random nodes. This has been going on for feaking YEARS!
Here I come, make 3 escalations, get annoyed, make the last escalation in a wording that caused tech project manager and an infra architect get involved voluntarily. A day passes by - a fix is already applied to infra and I'm already testing it.

these are the skills I've learned in previous job (in a hu--uuge corporation). I know I'd be struggling af today if hadn't worked there

When does a startup become a Corp? I saw an ad for a role at a startup that was over 5 years old.

I would say if a company has a fulltime proffessional HR person it will be ok.

So for your first job go to a bigger company. It will teach you how a business is structured. And everything should be tidy and organized and you just clock in at 9 and clock out at 5.

For the second job absolutely go for a young company. It will teach you many things that will be beneficial later in the career. This because you have to wear many different hats. Marketing, Design, Accounting maybe doing customer service answering questions, comming up with ideas for tricky problems. You'll become a jack of all trades who later impress corp managers with your broad knowledge and skills.

I like medium companies sized just right where you're able to know most of the people so around 800-2000. As you can have a chat with people with different and interesting skillsets to learn from them.

So my career advice
Showing genuine interest into other people no matter how high up will get you far.

@irene zolotye slova! About the anarchy :)

@irene I loved that phrase in nasha rasha :) 'zolotye slova yurij ivanovich'. Not sure if I recall that name correctly tho 😁

@irene more or less, yeah. But I always pretend I don't. I have my reasons :)

@irene as long as you are a chick 😁

@irene i remember your pic from AlexDelarge's post years ago. Looks like a pretty androgynous dude :P

Startup means shitty pay and unpaid overtime. No thanks.

@irene yeah haha probably that same one. Did you cut your hair? I am letting mine grow, funny thing is that I get an afro. Think hyde from that 70's show

Any job with people who want to share their knowledge and that you can learn something from them.

It doesn’t matter if it’s corporate or a startup, work culture is created by people that you work with not some corporate rules.