I wanted to ask the devs here, who have worked in both MNCs and startups, what the differences are that they saw.

Everything equal, mnc is better. Startup is invite to a stressful life.

I've worked for a Multi National Corp consultant firm. an an industry company.

But since the local branches were huge - I barely felt like I was at an MNC. The local branch has had our own setup, mangers and budgets. day to day it felt ko different compared to working for a large local company (Which I am currently)

As a consultant it's all about the current project anyways: if I'm 100% assigned to a Volvo project for 3 years it feels more like working for Volvo than anything else and doesn't matter much if the consultant firm is Big Global Consult Inc or a local company.

In the end the major thing that impacts how I feel day to day at work is my team size and my project size.

If my team is X devs, Y designers and Z managers and have ownership of our own product - I don't think it matters that much to me what kind of company we're part of: large startup, large local company, large MNC - whatever. My team is my day to day.

As long as it's a decent sized company with multiple tech teams it probably feels roughly the same in that your team is part of a larger whole.

Would be quite different though if it was a super tiny company where the CEO sits in on your sprint meetings

@aviophile I find MNC more stressful. Especially when you are approaching a deadline and your company issued laptop gets updates that you can’t postpone them. An engineering department is the smallest department so the IT always does the best decision for 99% of the company devices and engineering is the 1%. Or you just can’t get a task done because you can’t find the person who can help and you sit through months of meetings with non technical people that just don’t get what you need. Everything is out of your control and nightmarish.

Or startups are like, “Just make it happen.” Which means you take more responsibility and may not have good management… but that is easy to deal with because nothing stops you from doing a bunch of crazy things to change it.