I have to choose to accept an internship offer for dev role between company A and company B (potential PPO at both).

Company A: Unicorn startup ~3000 employees. A disruptor.
Company B: Early stage startup ~30 employees but has funding and all. Also, sounds promising. Loved their interview process.

Both are interesting to me and pay almost equally. Any inputs ranters?

Choose B if you're ready to work and learn hard.

Choose A if you want to be safe and cozy.

I've worked at a 5-person startup, and I've worked for a major US Telco provider. Both were life changing opportunities, but I wish I had asked the right questions to the smaller company before I got started:

* How often do I get paid?
* Tell me (everything) about your health insurance. How long do I have to wait before insurance plans are available to me.

* Am I an addition to your team, or am I replacing somebody <-- If this is a new role, are the expectations written? If this is an old role, why did they leave?

* How many customers do you have? Who is your largest customer? <-- Watch out for startups who have to make "that one large customer" happy to stay afloat.

* What type of software do you use internally? <-- Jira? Slack? Anything reasonable?

* Do you provide laptops? <-- Does the company invest in their employees?

* (For unlimited PTO) : What's the average amount of PTO taken? <-- The "unlimited PTO" startups are often "no PTO, we're too busy" companies.

... and congrats on the competing offers! That's awesome.

@WeAreMany I live in a constant state of Hussle. I think I'm gonna stay in this state for a while. Makes B more suitable but joining a Unicorn as a fresher can be a whole different experience. I also want to experience how things work in a large corp.

So a smaller younger company is often good for learning cause you have to do everything yourself. No bad/inefficient things because "this just how it's done here." Bigger companies are obviously safer, might have a better laid out career path and better benefits. If you want to experience the start up vibes, do it while you're young and money isn't the biggest factor

Choose the bigger company first and then slowly move to smaller companies. You sometimes get to learn best practices but most importantly you get to learn what NOT to do. Also it's good networking with more people.

@devphobe Thanks for the suggestion.

So I've been thinking if I want to start at top and move down ( in terms of company size ) or the other way around. I already worked in temporary roles at early stage startups ( even building an MVP). So it makes sense to move up slowly. Company B sounds more reasonable to me right now.