I've worked for large corporations and startups and definitely prefer startups.
Large corps are so mired in useless, mindless institutional procedures that you waste inordinate time satisfying the procedure beast, usually in areas that have nothing to do with your job (fun fact, I once worked as an analyst for a large corp and spent on average 4 hours a week taking industrial safety courses, volatile materials storage compliance training, etc.. The chances of me ever doing anything in the company in a warehouse, assembly plant, or anything other than look at a computer on a desk in an office park were 0). Sure there's some politics at the upper levels of a given organizational unit in a large company, but the pay tends to be pretty good and you'll have pretty good job security. IMHO large corps are great places to work when you are just starting out because your mistakes generally will just average out with everybody else.
Small companies/startups are such an entirely different beast it's night and day. You have huge impact in everything the company does. A single employee might account for 40% of the company revenue! The jobs are usually very versatile, you don't get stuck in a single task, you probably have to learn to do many different jobs -- you gain more experience than it looks like for a given unit of time compared to large co. For example, at large co, you might not be asked to work on contract negotiations until you've been there for 10 years. At startup you might do it from day one.
While large co's problems are mostly procedure issues, Startups are not without their issues -- and they're usually personnel problems:
1) Politics are magnified beyond belief. In large co, if my division manager was having a problem with another division manager, I might not even know. In a startup, it's like watching your parents fight over a family dinner.
2) Because everybody can have such a huge impact, screwups are magnified. A bad employee can literally sink a company. In a two person startup, that's 50% of the workforce.
3) There's very few checks against bad employees. One of the reasons large co has so many mindless procedures is to help control for bad employees. Startups don't really have a way to do that.
4) Job stability? Pffff...what's that? Pay is often not as good as large co, and benefits such as options or shares are just paper until you can buy beer with them.
I was once recruited to work at a very well funded startup that fell apart during salary negotiations. They wanted to make up for the low salary with catered meals and an all-you-can-eat pantry, dry cleaning and other benefits plus some options. I told them I'd rather trade those benefits for a pay check and would sign an agreement to never touch those benefits -- which wouldn't be hard since my position would require me to almost never actually be in the office where those benefits were offered. They backed out and it demonstrating to me that those benefits were simply flash and not worth the delta in salary they'd have to pay me.
Large corps are so mired in useless, mindless institutional procedures that you waste inordinate time satisfying the procedure beast, usually in areas that have nothing to do with your job (fun fact, I once worked as an analyst for a large corp and spent on average 4 hours a week taking industrial safety courses, volatile materials storage compliance training, etc.. The chances of me ever doing anything in the company in a warehouse, assembly plant, or anything other than look at a computer on a desk in an office park were 0). Sure there's some politics at the upper levels of a given organizational unit in a large company, but the pay tends to be pretty good and you'll have pretty good job security. IMHO large corps are great places to work when you are just starting out because your mistakes generally will just average out with everybody else.
Small companies/startups are such an entirely different beast it's night and day. You have huge impact in everything the company does. A single employee might account for 40% of the company revenue! The jobs are usually very versatile, you don't get stuck in a single task, you probably have to learn to do many different jobs -- you gain more experience than it looks like for a given unit of time compared to large co. For example, at large co, you might not be asked to work on contract negotiations until you've been there for 10 years. At startup you might do it from day one.
While large co's problems are mostly procedure issues, Startups are not without their issues -- and they're usually personnel problems:
1) Politics are magnified beyond belief. In large co, if my division manager was having a problem with another division manager, I might not even know. In a startup, it's like watching your parents fight over a family dinner.
2) Because everybody can have such a huge impact, screwups are magnified. A bad employee can literally sink a company. In a two person startup, that's 50% of the workforce.
3) There's very few checks against bad employees. One of the reasons large co has so many mindless procedures is to help control for bad employees. Startups don't really have a way to do that.
4) Job stability? Pffff...what's that? Pay is often not as good as large co, and benefits such as options or shares are just paper until you can buy beer with them.
I was once recruited to work at a very well funded startup that fell apart during salary negotiations. They wanted to make up for the low salary with catered meals and an all-you-can-eat pantry, dry cleaning and other benefits plus some options. I told them I'd rather trade those benefits for a pay check and would sign an agreement to never touch those benefits -- which wouldn't be hard since my position would require me to almost never actually be in the office where those benefits were offered. They backed out and it demonstrating to me that those benefits were simply flash and not worth the delta in salary they'd have to pay me.