7 Comments

Thanks for the mention! For the record I don't think I am more awesome than you. I do think startup is a nice fast-paced environment to learn, and I enjoy finding those similar opportunities inside Microsoft powered by The Garage. Good insights!

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Oh you are!

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Great read, Jade! I’ve worked in both worlds and I like more the startup world as you can focus more on the bigger picture and you can have more impact.

I was lucky to have plenty of early experiences in bigger companies where you can have more structured learning and access to mentors.

For juniors I would recommend to stay away from startups until they master the fundamentals and became a well rounded developer.

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Yeah I definitely agree!

I think it takes a specific type of junior to be able to go into a startup and thrive, for most a little bit more structure is best.

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Thank you for the mention Jade!

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Great article Jade! I've recently joined, well... not a big tech company as we mean it, but a large company. Coming from a scale up, I have to say it is quite an adjustment for me!

You touch a bit on it, but one of the things I find particularly difficult to accept is that I can't contribute the same way. In my scale up, if I wanted to improve something, I'd just find a way to allocate time for it and do it. Now, I feel I can't quite do it to the same extent and how I spend my time is a lot more watched (not in a controlling way, but more in terms of priorities and resource allocation).

The other thing I need to accept is how the nature of my job has changed: I used to mostly work on developing new features, building new services etc... Now I mostly work on maintaining programmes that were written 10-15 years ago!! Would you categorise this as a typical difference between start-up and big tech too?

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Your experience resonates with mine, except my path started with Big Tech and went into startups. I might write about it at some point.

Great read and thanks for mentioning my article!

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