I spent 3 years at one of the name-brand Wall Street firms before starting my own company. This essay rang true to me. It's now 5 years into my "startup" (Aside: can I still call it that? We have 25 employees and millions in revenue.)
I have no regrets. My goal is for our employees to have the kind of environment we always wished the large companies we used to work for would have. In fact, many of my early employees were "corporate rescues", bright engineers that had been languishing in comfortable corners of large bureaucratic BigCo's that we convinced to join us, mainly on the promise of actually being able to use Python as part of their day job and work on meaningful/interesting problems.
At our "startup", we use the best tool for the job; we only work with bright people; we focus on results; we never stagnate; and, we deliver on an important mission. Also, our engineers get to open source a lot of work that isn't core to the business (see e.g. http://parse.ly/code).
The only BigCo's that I've seen that have tried to maintain that engineering-friendly environment are e.g. Google and Facebook, but for those companies, size still becomes a limiting factor on impact. As the essay put it, "Proportionally, you will have a bigger impact on the company's future than you will working for a corporation."
Product development also has a different feel when you're trying to create one of the world's next great software companies, rather than when you just happen to work at one that already holds that title.
I have no regrets. My goal is for our employees to have the kind of environment we always wished the large companies we used to work for would have. In fact, many of my early employees were "corporate rescues", bright engineers that had been languishing in comfortable corners of large bureaucratic BigCo's that we convinced to join us, mainly on the promise of actually being able to use Python as part of their day job and work on meaningful/interesting problems.
At our "startup", we use the best tool for the job; we only work with bright people; we focus on results; we never stagnate; and, we deliver on an important mission. Also, our engineers get to open source a lot of work that isn't core to the business (see e.g. http://parse.ly/code).
The only BigCo's that I've seen that have tried to maintain that engineering-friendly environment are e.g. Google and Facebook, but for those companies, size still becomes a limiting factor on impact. As the essay put it, "Proportionally, you will have a bigger impact on the company's future than you will working for a corporation."
Product development also has a different feel when you're trying to create one of the world's next great software companies, rather than when you just happen to work at one that already holds that title.