
Ask HN: Starting career at a small or large company? - infinitebattery
Hello Hacker News! I&#x27;m a senior in a small midwestern college studying computer science, deciding where I want to go for my last internship (likely where I will end up full time).<p>I know a lot of software engineers browse HN and I wanted to crowdsource advice. My career goal is to be a senior software engineer &#x2F; engineering manager in 5-10 years from now. I&#x27;m facing two choices - one is a small company (~50 employees) in the financial media space. The other is a large N-tier bank (think Chase, BOA, C1).<p>I think this comes down to the tradeoffs between large companies and small companies. Being specific to starting careers, do you think one is better than the other?
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jppope
Start at a big company. The brand recognition will get you more interviews in
the future, and Big companies hire a lot of people... which if you're spry
will allow you to build a decent network (effectively alumni). Of course the
work is significantly less stimulating and if you have an entrepreneurial
spirit you'll be progressively more bothered by the bureaucracy (as a gross
generalization), but generally the tradeoffs are worth it for ~2-3 years

