"Software is eating the world" and there are quite few interesting problems. If are passionate about building something go for it or join a startup that your identify with - your growth and maturity will move at a lightening speed. But you can choose join a bigger company, a mature startup - many positives in going this route as well.
Startups are tough, and you need to be clear on why you ar echoosing this path. I will not ramble on more, but re-produce the thoughts shared by Paul Buchheit, YC Partner and creator of Gmail. Great advice. Hope you read the full piece - here we are re-producing a small section on well "Joining Startups"
Original article Triple Byte
Do you think every good engineer currently working at Google, Facebook, or Apple should quit to join a startup?
No.
If you're happy working where you are, and you don't have any ambition to do anything else, you're probably going to get paid less and work more if you leave. If getting paid less and working more is unappealing to you, then I would recommend staying where you are!
I feel the need to preface that any generalization about joining startups is basically wrong because startups have tremendously high variance. Most startups are s@@t. There's a few of them that are really exceptional, and if you land at an exceptional one, you can do really well. If you randomly pick something, you'll probably have a bad time.
A big company, like Google is today, has all these really smart people who are already experienced and know what they're doing. So, if you join Google, you're going to be working at your “correct” level. At a startup, though, they probably don't have the resources they need, so you can be operating way beyond your level. That's what I think is really great about startups.
Gmail is an example of this. I was 24 years old at the time, and I'd never completed a project of that scale or built anything like that before. Google today would never give that project to a relatively inexperienced 24 year old. But at a startup you can end up getting a project that a more mature company would give to a more experienced engineer.
Today, the big technology companies are paying engineers a lot more money than Intel was when you left for Google. How should that fact affect an engineer's decision to join a startup?
Yeah, that's hard. I think you have to view it as an investment. You're essentially investing in yourself. You have to believe that at the startup, you're going to learn and develop faster. If you don't think it will provide that, maybe you shouldn't take the job. If you go someplace with a lot of really smart people who are moving really fast, you can grow and develop as an engineer, or whatever you want to be, much faster than you would at a big company.
I would suggest thinking about joining a startup as more like going to grad school to learn. Optimize around learning when choosing a job. That's the best thing. Then if a startup fails, you can always go back to Google and probably get paid a lot more, because now you're actually a much better engineer than you would have been if you had stayed there like everyone else.
If you're thinking about joining a startup, how do you tell if the founders are like Larry and Sergey or if they're an Elizabeth Holmes?
Right, that's the worst combination: smart and full of s**t. I think you have to interview them a little bit. Ask hard questions and see if they give direct, insightful answers, or if they're evasive and dismissive. It also helps if there is a product you can try. I would avoid startups that have a ton of hype and no product.
Generally, when you are interviewing with a startup, how should you decide if it is the right company for you?
Looking back, one of the things that really impressed me about Google, which is probably good advice for anyone choosing a startup to work at, was that the interviewers all asked really smart questions. They asked things that only people who really knew their stuff could have answered well. Urs asked me, “Let's say you have a server, and it's running really slowly for some reason, how do you diagnose the cause?” To answer that question, you actually have to understand systems really well.
Their questions required being able to think at all these different levels: “Is there something going on in the kernel? Do you understand that hard drives are not these magical things which spit out information? Do you know why random access takes time?”
I only interviewed at one other company and they asked stupid questions like, “name the seven layers of the OSI Networking Stack,” or something that you'd pull out of a textbook, not things that were actually interesting.
Also, when I first went to work at Google, I had the opposite feeling I described having at Intel. I was excited. I woke up in the morning and was excited to go to work. There was this buzz of productivity in the office all the time. I think that's one way to know if a startup is doing well: When you go into their office, you can just tell. Are people busy working, or are they sitting around on Twitter wasting time? Are people showing up because they have to, or are they eagerly working because they're excited? Google was a really energizing place to be back then.