> However, that same community feeling and sense of purpose is what I remember fondest from working at startups. In addition, startups give you access to other capable and driven people that you might create a startup of your own with
Depends a lot on the specific startup and specific big company. The 50-person startup I worked at right out of college never really found product-market fit, and tried many things, and the product I worked on (and deeply enjoyed working on technically) was always a second-class product to the business. And we were selling B2B software, so I was never motivated by wanting to change the world, just by wanting to ship some cool software.
I get that same motivation at my current 1500-person employer, where I work on developer tools; I get to work on interesting technical problems, and the fruits of my work go to help people in, frankly, the same industry as most of our customers at the startup. I'm a little more involved in what out internal customers actually do and therefore find it more motivating to help them, though the work they do, per se, isn't interesting to me. And there are plenty of driven, passionate, and friendly people around who care about the same problems I care about, and it's much easier to find a few of those people and make a community when I've got orders of magnitude more people to try to work with.
Depends a lot on the specific startup and specific big company. The 50-person startup I worked at right out of college never really found product-market fit, and tried many things, and the product I worked on (and deeply enjoyed working on technically) was always a second-class product to the business. And we were selling B2B software, so I was never motivated by wanting to change the world, just by wanting to ship some cool software.
I get that same motivation at my current 1500-person employer, where I work on developer tools; I get to work on interesting technical problems, and the fruits of my work go to help people in, frankly, the same industry as most of our customers at the startup. I'm a little more involved in what out internal customers actually do and therefore find it more motivating to help them, though the work they do, per se, isn't interesting to me. And there are plenty of driven, passionate, and friendly people around who care about the same problems I care about, and it's much easier to find a few of those people and make a community when I've got orders of magnitude more people to try to work with.