Switching From Early Stage Startup To A Big Tech Company

For someone who’s worked exclusively in early-stage startups for almost all his career, switching to a big tech company was surely a task. This post describes the changes you’ll notice when you switch from a startup to a big tech company. Let’s get right into it.

You have teams for everything

Need your payroll questions cleared, there’s the payroll team for that. Need information about how to refer someone? There’s the Talent Acquisition Team for that. Need your preview builds scaled up? There’s the SRE Team for that.

You get the picture, there is a team for anything that you might need, some people being part of multiple teams based on their expertise. Chances are if there isn’t already a team for something, there will be once there is a need for it.

Roles and processes are more clearly defined

Just as there is a team for everything, the roles and competencies of each person are clearly defined, you will find people who specialize in Marketing, and then people who specialize in Design. At a startup, the design guy is also usually the creative guy that thinks of marketing ideas. There is a person you can reach out to for each specific type of request.

Work takes slightly more time

With all the processes in place and the number of people things have to go through, it’s not uncommon to be sitting for a long time for your changes to take effect or your questions to be answered. If it’s tech, the process might still be slightly faster than normal, for everything else, don’t mind if the process takes a lot more time than expected.

You suddenly have slightly more time on your hands

Since there can be boundaries for your work and your personal life, there will suddenly be slightly more time on your hands to do things other than work, probably working on that side-project will finally be possible since there isn’t anyone calling you on a weekend for a “Small fix” that takes hours. Going for a road trip means you can leave your work laptop behind and not have to worry about it.

You are not constantly working on something groundbreaking

Being part of an early-stage startup is often associated with working on something truly groundbreaking (Though not always), working at a bigger company is not going to be all-exciting work however, usually, you will be working on mundane stuff in the beginning, and that is okay, as long as the company works on something larger than yourself, you have to understand that you are contributing to that goal. The people manually inputting values to the Apollo 11 computers were no less important than the astronauts themselves.

Work-Life Balance is easier

You can log off work at 5 pm and most likely, no one will message you for some work till the next morning. Taking an off is no longer a make-or-break-the-company decision (At a startup, there are no off days, just break periods). It is hence easier to spend more time with family and friends, or doing what you like outside of work, compared to your startup being what you love to do in the first place.

Work is easier

You are no longer working under the constant pressure of delivering something awesome every single day, although that’s expected. Another fact is that you no longer have the entire burden of running your part of the company, which in the case of a startup, is almost always true. You no longer have to worry about your changes breaking production because a majority of what could go wrong is already taken care of or thought of before the changes even hit the deployment pipeline.

You miss the startup, but this experience comes with its own set of learnings

If you’ve loved working at a startup, no other place will feel quite the same.

The above is true, I’ve worked at startups since the start and there’s no place else that feels like a startup. It has a thrill to it and once you get the habit of working there, it’s magical. That being said, there is something to learn from every place, a bigger company also provides a lot of opportunities to learn and grow, along with a better balance with personal life.

Big companies are big today because they did something right, and there will always be people in those companies that would have seen the company grow from a startup to where it is today and there’s a lifetime worth of wisdom you can get from those people.

In conclusion, this post is not to make fun of either a startup or a slightly bigger company, far from it. This post just highlights the differences you will notice when you move from a small startup to a bigger company.

For everyone, it’s a choice, and which one of the two someone likes is totally up to them. I like working in both, there is something to learn from everything in life, and there are tradeoffs in both, you just have to decide what works for you.