Startups vs Big Tech - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

dud I messed up a couple of things last time I was streaming so I just want to make sure I can do a better job of it this time like I forgot to actually turn on the Instagram streaming and it looks like I'm on Instagram now so that's good news cool um the topic today is going to be startups versus big Tech and my goal here is not to to persuade you or make you think that I'm trying to tell you one of them is superior to the other or anything like that that's going to be the topic of discussion I do have a better view of the chat this time so I should be able to see messages and stuff coming in so I do really like for these to be interactive so by all means if you have questions uh even if it's not about the topic and you want them answer just drop them in the chat happy to answer the whole point is that I want this to be interactive right so uh I want to be able to help share some of my experiences and hopefully they help you so with that said when we talk about I mean anything really but uh in particular when I'm going to start kind of uh comparing and contrasting startups and big Tech I want to make sure I can talk about bias first of all because I think it's important to understand that everything we start to analyze like ad pros and cons to there's there's going to be some amount of bias like um any person who's explaining whatever perspective is going to have bias so I want to start with that so that as I'm navigating some of these Concepts and explaining them answering questions whatever it happens to be that you understand what my biases are right and as much as possible I want to be aware of those when I'm explaining things but I think it's important to to draw attention to bias so um I think it's important to mention that I spent uh you know my internships in University at small companies startups so um some of my earliest experiences working in Industry were at very small companies or startups that shaped a lot of my perception of you know working as a software engineer so I think that's important to acknowledge I do think that I spent time uh the largest part of my career was at a small company uh very much a startup that grew to you know hundreds of people so I got to experience you know St up growth I got to go through that those early days of it being I don't want to say a struggle and that's another bias I'll mention in a second it wasn't necessarily a struggle but it was a ton of work right so we have to factor in those things and the other thing that I'll mention is of course right now I'm at Microsoft so there's some bias there like I I haven't worked at all of the big tech companies Microsoft is one such big tech company so there's some bias with that right the other bias I wanted to mention about risk I kind of briefly hinted at it but I've worked at small companies and startups but I don't feel like any of them was necessarily risky and that's an important factor which we'll talk about in a little bit uh which is risk but my bias from my own experiences has been that I did not work at startups where it felt like oh crap like this is risky like you know am I what am I giving up to to be part of this startup in fact I worked at startups that were you know by people who were either not I don't want to say necessarily like serial entrepreneurs like somewhat um some of them actually yes uh but you know they they could have been startups that had um they were already profitable because they had you know paying customers without investment uh bootstrapped by serial um entrepreneurs um the kind of kind of thing where I don't feel like I'm taking a huge risk to be part of that startup so that's some of my bias going into this hello hello on YouTube thanks for the comments so with all of that said I I want to I mean and I'll try to identify bias as I'm going through this because there might be some topics as we get into them I'll go oh crap like I do have a bit of bias towards that so I will try to be accountable if I can the whole reason that I'm I'm talking about startups and big Tech couple couple reasons I guess one of them is in a recent newsletter I I mentioned that when it comes to job searching but another reason is because this is something that's been asked of me like when people are looking for jobs and things like that they're starting to ask like well what is it like at a startup right like like should I be doing that what's your experience doing that because I think people are trying to to do a bit of uh investigation or modeling right they're trying to say like if I'm trying to get into industry like what should I be doing and we all know like right now the tech job market and I'm sure other job markets are very challenging so it's it's really what's a good way to put this sorry I lost my train of thought the with the job markets being so tough right now and people trying to think about like where the best way to start is it's like it's really challenging for me to say like yeah sure like here's what I did you should just do the same thing I I think that's where I was getting stuck on is like when it comes to advice and this is why the bias part is so important it's really difficult to to just say here's what I did there follow it I need to kind of step back and and try to offer a bit something a little bit more generalized with the the caveat of the bias attached to it um there's a good question in the chat too um maybe I'll I'll answer this sort of at the beginning because it's uh it's it's right here and I think it's pretty good but so after being at Microsoft did you ever think about going back to any startup so this is a good question um and again if I back up from like Microsoft in particular just thinking about the experiences of big p versus startups um I'm very much the kind of person where like for a startup after having gone through it from a very small company so the the the startup that I work for is a company it's a digital forensics company called magnet forensics and I was there not at the very first day but like basically right at the beginning of them starting an engineering team and I I know what went into that company from the development side from the beginning to get to where they are today like I can say that very confidently because I lived it and I don't think this is sort of a requirement for any startup but I can remember working like a ridiculous amount not because they made me at all but I can remember the amount of time and energy that had to go into that to be able to kind of I I feel like put it on the trajectory that it needed at least from the development side I'm not trying to claim responsibility for all of the development or all of the sales and marketing nothing like that but I saw what went into that and I wasn't the only person kind of putting in like everything so the question would I go back to any startup um I don't know I think at some point in my career I would like to have a software company that that's sort of a a long-term goal of mine that excites me I don't know when that is so like someone from Microsoft is watching it's not like I'm planning to leave like not the case at all um I think that's something that I want in my life I think that would be very cool but I think it if I go to a startup I think it needs to be my own and the reason I say that is because I don't know how old I was like 23 till like 30 31 whatever the time frame was I was at Magnet forensics I I is this going to sound like an exaggeration but I kind of mean it like I basically gave up that part of my life I almost didn't do anything else for those eight years again no one made me do that that's just kind of how I was but I I gave up that time I literally basically just went to work ate went to the gym and slept for like eight years so I think if I were to do a startup it would need to be my own for me to put the the energy that I'd want to into that because I think I'm 35 now I don't think I have the energy to dedicate to someone else's um startup at this point the added context here and thank you context is incredibly important for right um so for contact the only company worked ever is Microsoft I always wanted to try a startup a risk factor yeah so I think funny I I wrote some notes down risk is the after my intro on bias risk is the first one that I wanted to talk about and I I needed to lead with the bias first because I never was in a situation where the startups where I was at felt like Risk now arguably any company has risk like everything has risk that we do right and I think even more so if we rewind a few years I would say that probably people perceived uh startups as being the riskier thing to do of course right um small company just starting up maybe people haven't done this before a lot more risk in big companies they've been around for years so like a lot less risk of them failing right because something pretty dramatic would have to happen but I think the other thing that's important is that probably the Assumption about job market stability that was probably a big factor and I want to I don't want to like dwell on this I just think it's an important point I I understand that um timing for jobs and and like sort of the whole Tech scene is very challenging right now so it's not my intention to I don't know to gloss over it or to minimize it because I do think it's incredibly impactful at this moment but I think probably people used to maybe not so much now I don't know but maybe people used to say oh big Tech like to get my good good salary I get good benefits I get um stock options and it's it's stable it's secure like once I'm in I'm in no worries and I don't I I guess I don't know if people always had that perception but I I think probably a lot of people leaned into that a lot and and I think probably because for the most part like the companies are more stable they don't have to go through uh you know it's not like bad product launching the whole company goes under or something because they're so diverse like big tech companies right so diverse in their offerings but I think that narrative is changing a little bit and I think when people see the the mass layoffs and stuff like that and they see the instability in general in the job market um I I think some some people start to question like is and I'm not like Microsoft is the example here and I work there right so it's not Microsoft specific this is really in big Tech is it really as stable as people might have thought I don't know I'm not part of like layoff decisions and things like that so I'm not I don't mean to not trying to speak from like a position of authority on it but I do think that that's um maybe a different type of consideration that that comes into the mix when we talk about startups and big Tech used to seem very much more like stability in big Tech maybe not now but I do still think from the startup perspective I don't think it's changed that you could potentially be looking at company that has a significant amount of risk so I'm not an expert on this I've worked at a few startups and this was at the earliest times of my career so some of the bias there is like I've never done this as like a more mature adult uh you know I have over a decade of experience now in the industry and I've learned a whole bunch and I think at the time when I was navigating hey like especially my internships like what's what would be a good startup to go work out for an internship part of the thing at that point was like it's an internship it's four months like company should probably last four months not a whole lot of risk for me um you know that's not a great way to look at things if you're if you're sort of outside of an internship opportunity but some things I was looking at when I graduated and it was like should I go work at this startup because that was my first job outside of University was a startup I was very hesitant I know like the idea of a company having a lot of funding can be very appealing right because like hey there's a lot of money that went into this company it's like there's people that believe in it they literally put millions of dollars into it like how could it you know how could it fail like you know it seems exciting you know that's a bit of an exaggeration obviously there's a lot that can go wrong but I think people get excited about that and I I was very much the opposite because I don't know what it was but the thought of a lot of capital going into a company made me think like like what are they doing with it like hopefully paying me that's cool but like it's a business so like what are they doing with the money and if they're not making money like where does the money did we just keep getting money from investors like I don't know it seems like a good deal for investors maybe I don't know if that's a good bet for me um and the other thing too is like and I'm speaking in generalizations right like I don't know if that means it's a good opportunity for me to you know have a a long-term growth plan in a company do they know what they're doing like they're getting money that's cool but do they know what they're doing so for me my first job outside of University was like this is hopefully something longterm the the thing that really was appealing to me was we don't have external investment and we're profitable we have paying customers and we're profitable but right away I was like well that's pretty cool like I don't I don't feel like I need to worry and the types of U the type of business it was in was like selling to law enforcement government agency so I'm like this feels pretty stable with respect to risk so I guess one of the biases I have that I should have mentioned in the beginning of this is when it comes to taking risks I personally feel like I'm pretty conservative um I wish I wasn't so conservative about some options because I feel like that holds me back a lot so um I I apologize if I'm pronouncing your name or you're handling correctly but Swami if that's correct I think what I would recommend like to you is depending on your risk appetite I think when it comes to risks and startup there is potentially significantly more risk with a given company a startup but depending on what's being offered there that could be like significantly more rewarding financially potentially right if you're having a lot of equity in that um it could be more rewarding there's some other aspects I want to get into about startups and smaller companies but you you might find it more rewarding but you have to be able to tolerate the risk profile that's the other thing right like back to your question if I were to leave Microsoft at some point when I go back to a startup aside from it wanting like me wanting it to be my own company I I think it would be very difficult at this point to like convince me like hey there's no there's no or low risk to this because like being so conservative in my in my uh my current work it would be very difficult to move me the offer got to be so appealing that um I'm willing to take any amount of risk so I do think when it comes to deciding about going to a startup especially if you are say in big pack at Microsoft um your your risk appetite needs to be you need to understand that so understanding your own risk appetite and then going like okay well what are the the aspects of a company that I feel like I can drisk right what are you willing to live with so for example I'll just make this up right if if a company was like say they got awesome technology you really believe in it you're passionate about it um if you are if they were like hey look like we uh we can't pay you for the first six months would you automatically be like well no I have obviously have to pay a mortgage like no thanks like feel over or would you be willing to say look I got money in Saving like I actually believe in this so much that I'm willing to kind of put that off like those are all types of things like I can't make that decision for you but I really think that you need to like kind of evaluate that and what trade-offs you're willing to accept so other way around did you have any bias during your first job you had an offer Microsoft and startup would have been tough um yeah I think so um and I'll I'll back up a little bit too even for um going for internships right i' I said this publicly before I was interested in working at startups during my internships because I felt like I felt like that's where I would be able to sort of like learn more and like I don't know have more impact relative to what I was doing if that makes sense but I think like I think if I applied I don't think I applied to Microsoft but say I applied to Microsoft and I applied to a bunch of startups and Microsoft offered like I think at that time I probably would have just been like yeah Microsoft like this is also why I'm trying to talk about this kind of stuff too because I don't like I love working at Microsoft so I'm not trying to speak ill of it but I think that I wasn't putting a ton of thought into it like if that would have been an option I probably just would have been like people say this is you know it's the right thing to do you go work at Big Tech you know like you've you know checked the Box you kind of accomplished the career stuff but like it's not just not reality um so I do to answer your question I do think I probably would have opted for Microsoft if I was just if I had the offer there um but but also and if I maybe I'll kind of segue into some other topics I want to talk about learning I I genuinely don't think that I would have learned nearly as much if I started my career at Microsoft versus going through a startup that's my opinion and that doesn't mean because I think Microsoft is bad or Facebook or meta or whatever right I don't think big Tech is bad or any specific company is bad I actually don't like thinking about things as like strictly just good or bad I kind of like thinking about I don't know like things on a spectrum and kind of understanding where they're at but the respect of good and bad I don't think that makes sense to say but like the learning opportunity at a startup is kind of ridiculous you're if you're at a if you're at a place that you feel I want to use the word comfortable and I say that because like you could be learning you're probably going to learn a lot no matter what at a startup but if you're at a startup where like everything is going wrong and it's bad all the time you're probably learning a whole bunch of stuff but maybe it's all stuff you're like I don't want to be doing this um I do think that there are a lot of pieces or aspects to a startup that you end up learning where you might not want to learn about them but they're incredibly valuable and the example I want to give you is like we talk about business value a lot right especially in in big Tech we're talking about driving impact for business value right so um like at Microsoft in particular in terms of performance and promotions like one big area that we get focus on is like how much business value Are you delivering what's your impact right it's not it's not just oh did you like talk to this person and that person and they check a box it's like no truly like tell us about the impact and then that will be a big weight in in the decision making so we talk about business impact a lot but like do people understand it and I think at a startup you're basically forced you're depending how big or small it is you're like almost forced to be exposed to that so when a company is incredibly small and you're on the development team it's a couple of people there's a sales and a marketing team maybe it's one person right like depending on the scope of it you're around these other roles so much that you see how the business works you don't know all the details like I've never sold anything at a digital forensics company I've never done any marketing at a digital forensics company but I've talked with these people a whole lot especially in the very beginning and even as it scaled right like you keep those relationships um but you learn so much about the other areas of the business and that is like one foundational thing that I think personally if I went into Microsoft Amazon Facebook right away that probably just would have like been completely omitted I shouldn't say complete that's not fair but like it would have been lacking in comparison and what was instilled in me from being at a startup again we like the startup I was at was profitable without investment but we still like the way that I looked at it was still like we shouldn't be wasteful like it's not my money to waste and I know that like we don't just have someone else's millions of dollars so you know we it was always like kind of thinking about how do we keep the business going like how do we keep moving it forward and I again I don't feel like I would have had that instilled in me if it was like make if I don't do my work today like Microsoft is going to suffer like it's such a enormous entity that like me not doing that wouldn't have a significant impact at a startup it very well could and that really kind of I don't know it was like motivating was aligned with how I like to work um just going to check the comments here reviewing my subcontract as a software engineer my lawyer keeps saying I have minimized my scope um so the lawyer keeps saying have to minimize your scope the companies four people each person does everything not sure what is minimize a scope means um I like I'm not I'm not a lawyer so I'll start by saying that and I've obviously not read your contract um I think probably what this this person suggesting and I don't know the context of why they're suggesting in the first place but just to answer question like what does minimize the scope mean kind of sounds like the opposite of what I'm trying to encourage or what happens at a startup it's like I mean you kind of set it in your own comment everyone's doing everything like I know what happens at startups like that's the nature of it so um yeah like I don't know why they're suggesting that maybe it's because if you're if your contract for work is suggesting you need to do these particular things like you're almost overstepping what your contract is asking for that's potentially what that's supposed to mean uh which could be for a number of reasons maybe legally you're not supposed to be based on your contract like you're actually overstepping by helping again I don't know I'm not a lawyer or maybe they're trying to suggest like you're doing more than you're getting paid for and they're just trying to say like take your foot off the gas you don't need to be doing that so I don't know but maybe that helps you think through it so learning opportunities at startups like said by being exposed to different roles and things like that you have it's a tremendous perspective that's kind of I want to say like forced upon you it's not forced it's just kind of like you know part of being at a small company you see these things um we would do we would do like weekly Town Hall meetings like weekly all hands right and we would talk about sales numbers and stuff like that like it doesn't doesn't affect me directly as I'm coding right that has nothing to do with the code that I'm writing but it's cool to know that we're making things and we're seeing like kind of everything come together as a system like the sales and marketing team has to work to go sell the things that we're building and like it just felt like a huge I mean it was a very tight-knit team and it just kept growing but we kept that culture and I thought that was huge so you get expose all these learning opportunities but the other thing that I'll mention and this is not it's not big Tech or startup but like you want to think about the um the types of like mentorship opportunities and who you can learn from so one example this like is in the favor of startups one of the internships I had one of the startups I applied for was founded by like X Nvidia executive and like head engineers and for me I was like that is so cool like these guys got to be super smart and surprised they were ridiculously smart so it was super cool to go to this company and like the CEO was like a genius engineer my manager had like multiple patents was like a genius engineer like it was so cool to work under them and have like that um that technical support and sort of mentorship so you can depending on where you're applying to you might you know might really believe in the founder like the team and stuff that's there um and the reason I'm saying this is not like prer con to Big Tech versus startup is like you can have the same type of thing at a big tech company right like I'm a c developer there are lots of C developers that I look up to that work at Microsoft so uh that's really cool right they're not like directly on my team but there's one in particular I don't know I don't want to like say people's names in case they care or whatever but even for like a hobby project I messaged them on teams one day and was like Hey like I know this isn't work rated and I don't want to bother you but like I know you're an expert in this like what are your thoughts and I was kind of just looking for a bit of feedback and he wrote me this Pro I I'm never going to forget this he wrote me this program I've said this on another live stream or video that I've done and the program that he sent me I was like I don't I've been programming in c for like 15 years now and I was like I can barely read this like it's so it's just so Advanced I was like this is the coolest thing the coolest code that anyone's ever given me so learning opportunities again like at Big tech companies there might be people that you really look up to there so it's not special to one or the other but something that you can consider agree with you on the learning opportunties I wouldn't say you don't have learning opportunities indeed there are many but learning opportunities are scope to job functions and startups people are focused across job functions 100% that's 100% so again if we take the big Tech side right like um I'll give you an example because I've just switched teams at Microsoft over the past uh the beginning of this year so I work in the I still work within a part of Microsoft that's called substrate so we have like the platform and infrastructure for all of The Office 365 Services team that I was on for about three years was three and a half years yeah was uh called deployment and we deploy basically every service that goes onto the machines the data center so from if I I'm trying to rewind my career right like if I started in Microsoft and I started on the deployment team I would have very specific knowledge about deployment technology for Microsoft specifically with an exchange or or substrate exchange is a really big part of substrate so um so I would have that knowledge and it's not that that's not valuable right because if I like with all things if we start to look at the abstractions of it the Met like uh Zubin who we interviewed on another podcast uh follow him on LinkedIn I can't remember Pratt I don't know have prap um amazing uh he was talking about meta principles but if you can extract some of these Concepts and stuff from what you're doing there's tons of lessons to learn but uh Swami agreed with your comment like that's a lot of what you're learning is scope to job function and it just so happens that at startups your job function is basically everything uh or it's at least spread a lot more than you probably anticipate so there is lots of learning at both but it can look very different and I think personally the the way my career has gone I would not have uh knowing what I know now I would not have traded big Tech in the beginning at least for learning opportunities and I was very fortunate to work at startups that had no issue with risk and things like that uh they were very successful so that's that's been my experience so I wouldn't recommend that to someone if their risk appetite was not there but for if we factor that out and we're just looking at learning I I think that it was invaluable to be at a startup personally okay um I want to talk about want to talk about like levels and career progression because this one's kind of interesting and I I recently was talking about this in R about this where uh for a long time I just didn't think about it or care about it because it didn't matter it didn't change anything about my life so at startups actually let me back up in big tech companies like there's if you haven't seen it yet like there's a website called levels.fyi I think a lot of people working in big Tech know about this website basically it has across all these big tech companies here's like the levels they have and here's the salary bands and it's based on real data that people submit it's like wildly accurate and if you are looking at Big tech companies going well I need to be at this level to make this much money like it makes it much more motivating to be at a big tech company and be like I'm at this level what do I got to do to get to the next level because it's like it's there like you have the information that's telling you like get to hear and here's what happens and I've noticed that like the focus on I don't want to say like the focus on Career progression is so much more in big Tech but I mean like the focus it's like specifically on level progression because that's how career progressions quantitatively measured that focus is very big right that is the measuring stick that tells us in big Tech because once that level changes then the other things happen like then the compensation goes up these stock options all this stuff like that changes as a result but it makes to me it makes a ton of sense coming to Microsoft and seeing a lot of the motivation for levels like even my perspectives Chang where I'm like I mean that is the measuring stick of course of course I'm going to align to that but prior to Microsoft so if I use magnet forensics as an example again when I was there especially I don't even know for how many years like we never had levels it just wasn't a thing you were just for us we had dedicated testers and we had software Engineers so you were like a tester or a developer that was it right and like the I I never understood why people care about levels like what does it matter you do a good job at the end of the year if you've done a good job your pay goes up like that's we have we have the one number and it's the pay like it goes up if you do good um so I I never got it but um it did make more sense you know as time went by it took me a long time to figure it out actually like honestly just prior to coming to Microsoft like probably the last year and a bit is when I really started to realize like oh people are like people aren't staying here for Life they're not staying at Magnet friends for life and what does that mean if they're coming here and going thank you for the time at this company and I'm ready for the next one if they were I'm going to make some you know roles up they the principal or staff engineer or senior engineer somewhere and they come to magnet and then they're just developer like because there's no contact and then they want to go get another job it almost looks like on paper it's backwards but like there just was no levels so we did introduce senior and since I've been gone there's other also I don't even know the levels now I've seen people that work at Magnet that have staff in their and their title so it sounds like they've done a much better job of like building that but that was just like a you know a growing game it's not because someone sat there and they're like we don't want levels like that levels are bad it was just like we we don't know what to do for levels we got to build them there's no like Cookie Cutter apply the rules for for levels right so I wanted to bring this up because if you're spending time in a startup that may not be a factor for them they might not be focused on does your career Leveling System look like because they're probably focused on how the heck do we keep this company afloat get paying customers so that we're out of this mode of trying to like just survive and that takes a long time that can take years of course if you have investment and stuff like that that can look very different I have not lived through that I've never gone through a company that just had a ton of capital injection and they could start operating differently that never happened for me but that might be something you want to consider right I was personally not motivated by it but I had never experienced the other side so the question that was brought up in the chat okay after being in big Tech we go back to a startup well I might have this this in my mind if I if it wasn't my own startup and I was just thinking about you know going between companies if I went from Big Tech to a startup and then I want I was like okay well no startup's not for me I got to go back into big Tech I like I actually don't know how that might fit into like what my resume looks like in terms of levels I would hope that a recruiter a hiring manager wouldn't say oh went to a startup like nope prob probably not but probably in you know for myself I might feel like hey like this does this look like potentially a step back like it wasn't progressing my career I don't know but that is a potential gap of course not every startup is this way I I'm obviously making huge generalizations but having something like a career leveling guide is potentially not on the on the road map for some startups something to keep in mind okay impact um we talked about impact a little bit because I was giving a bit of a comparison but I found like this is something that I suspected and started my career off this way and it it certainly seem to lend through at least in my experience so I mentioned earlier on on the stream right like I I wanted to start with startups because in University for my internships I wanted to feel like the impact I was having relative to the size of the company was was tangible right like companies 10 people I'm 10% of the company like my impact should be felt but that's the experience that I wanted at a startup and I I I think that's how it panned out and so much so like when I was working at Magnet forensics I felt like I got to have a tremendous amount of impact that was actually something that probably changed how I work in general as I wasn't I want to say I wasn't super motivated I wasn't super motivated by work before that but I think my my manager I guess the CTO right he had a lot of trust in me gave me a lot of uh you know Runway to go do stuff and believe that I could do it so I just kept doing it and it you know impact was felt like cool like that was really good like keeps building the trust and it for me it was like a a vicious cycle I can keep you keep you know kind of uh extending the the the lead and like all of a sudden like you you're not holding on to the leash anymore and I'm able to kind of do more and more and it just felt really rewarding and the impact was always very tangible in my opinion and I and I really appreciated that so now big Tech here's the difference like because impact can be looked at many different ways I want to give you an example I was talking about impact at a startup or a small company I'm like hey I'm 10% of the company my impact should be felt I'm a very small fraction of what of what Microsoft is I don't know what fraction of a percent I am but it's it's small but what's cool that working at some of these big tech companies the scale it's ridiculous like the we're talking about a different type of impact altogether so it's not necessarily like you know I I code something and SAA calls me up on teams and he's like awesome job I can't believe you coded that that's so cool but that's the kind of impact I could have had at the smaller company where the CTO or the CEO the founder they they see what you're doing and that feels like uh really rewarding but I'll give you an example like at Microsoft it's like you go making some optimizations and now you're saving millions of dollars per year like like or tens or hundreds of millions of dollars like depending on what it is the the features that you're rolling out are going out to hundreds of millions of customers so impact looks different but impact also is not necessarily just quantitative in terms of scale right it's you have to figure out what kind of impact you are looking for to kind of gauge this so I tried to give you a couple different examples there one was like how is my impact felt within the company kind of like who can recognize this work right the other was like at scale in big Tech you can go do something and the impact is so huge because of the scale of the company right whether that's features saving money you know C more customers using it so the scale of that impact is huge but here's the other thing and this is not necessarily tied to startups or big Tech it's just something to factor in when it comes to impact this one is a little bit less quantitative but arguably the most important um and I don't even know a good way to phrase this but like like who is feeling the impact and what does that impact on their life so um to give you an example I I work in a routing team now if anyone who's working in routing would be like obviously we want to reduce latency but to give you an example if we were to only reduce latency or or we let latency slip on some requests by a millisecond or two milliseconds like that has impact for us as a service we don't want to do do that right or if our ability to Route things brought from being like three or four five NES accurate down to like it's only 99% accurate so one out of every 100 requests you do we drop like the impact on one user like on one human you're probably like hey what the heck happened and then they do it again and it's fine right so the impact on a single user doesn't feel that meaning obviously it's scale I'm not trying to minimize the the value of that but I'll give you the other example of being at the digital forensic company because I think this one's going to be pretty obvious the digital forensic company we made digital forensic software we didn't perform the investigations but we sold it to law enforcement government agencies people doing investigations and a lot of the time the software was used to help catch pedophiles now I don't know about you but tell me one thing that's more rewarding than help put people like that away and for me that's a struggle because the impact of that work was so immense on that kind of level we're not it wasn't you know millions of users right so that's that wasn't the factor but knowing that I went through my career and even if I helped save one child like was that worth eight years of constantly working to save one child's life or to be part of that yeah like absolutely it was and the cool thing is that I know I got I know that I got to be part of helping more than that I didn't do the work but I contributed to it and to me that's that's a huge type of impact so again I don't think that you need to like pick between startups and big Tech to like to find that impact but I think that's a consideration the whole framing of this right is like hey like if you're looking for a job where should you go like I think you want to you want to think about that where do you want to have an impact now depending on your financial situation some people might say like doesn't really matter right now like I'm looking for a job and I understand that you you need to be in a place where you feel comfortable right you need to have your things paid for you need to feel like steady state but if that's something that you have or you feel that you can get both like the meaning behind your work I think is is really what's going to leave a lasting impression just checking the chat I've been in startups for five years but I noticed the work gets to be too much and spread over different roles and th gets me shallow on most things instead of being focused yep that can absolutely happen um I obviously I don't know the startups you're at so thank you for sharing this I don't know the startups you're at but this could be a a growth challenge right um this even happens like even at Microsoft the last team I was on or the teams I was managing like they those people were getting spread too thin for sure um so it happens in big Tech too but it's like it can be uh like systematic in a startup right and that can feel very grueling it can feel like there's no end to it like you know it's one more project oh like you know just stay late for this one now and go help on these things and like it doesn't seem to end so I get that that can that can absolutely happen but I do I kind of think that's a scaling problem because ideally if those are problems that are repeating then the company should be able to hire in roles to help for that and I say that not like hey it's simple just add more people I know it's not that simple but I think that that's part of it there's either more people to help which isn't just snap your fingers and more people show up um it could be the way that the work is split up and where the responsibilities like could be a lot of factors but that I I definitely get where you're coming from I think that can that can be really draining so it's not unique to startups but certainly that that kind of like you know startup grind that's part of it uh I yeah there's a Sala blockchain reference uh I don't know I stopped looking at crypto a long time ago and I don't want to and I don't want to talk about it so we're not going to so yeah impact impact can look different but my guess my take away there was um the meaning behind your impact can be can be the biggest impact on you um there you go some something inspiring right um maybe last thing I'll talk about is compensation I got about 13 minutes left of like planned talking but if there's still questions and stuff I'll keep going happy to do that compensation um one of I should this is a bias that I should have mentioned um I am from Canada I'm currently living in the US working for Microsoft but when I was working in Canada te companies at the for me at least in my experience things were a lot more straightforward it was like here's your salary your benefits and potentially stock options depending on the company right it was the focus was salary and benefits now when you go applying for big Tech you'll see I I mentioned levels.fyi earlier if you're just joining the stream or whatever you weren't paying attention that's a site you can check out and you you'll see like total compensation and some of the numbers can be absolutely ridiculous but this was a difference between the startups I was at and big Tech because in big Tech when you're talking about total compensation it's here's your salary so I'm like I understand what that number means here's your what Your Benefits look like and for me that was a little bit weird just because it's Canada to the US I'm like I never had to worry about health insurance I don't know what that means but you know two two common things and then and then it was like signing bonus in cash and I'm like so I I just start working for you and here's you just hand me cash like that wasn't a thing for me before I didn't didn't know what that meant and the other part was the stock options now stock options can look very different even across big tech companies but one of the things I was mentioning earlier in the Stream about taking risks with startups is like if they give you good equity and you believe in it and it is successful I mean it's pretty rare right it's not like lots of startups just become wildly successful or everyone would be doing it and there would be tons of really successful startups but most of them fail but you know if you're at the right one it can do really well uh R ridiculous in terms of of accuracy or simply or too much money um it's because it's three factors and I didn't mention the third one yet is um or maybe I just did yeah stock options salary and um my goodness and cash signing bonus so what it looks like when you see compensation if I'm going to make up a number right if I was getting $100,000 a year in Canada and I had uh health or I had benefits great and then it's like oh and you get some stock options but it's a startup like they're not really they're not worth anything what's it valued at who knows but you get some get some shares and then you go to a big tech company and they're like here's your salaries higher and something I should call out too is the salary difference between Canada and the US was like was incred different but let's say it's the same okay so here's a $100,000 salary but also here's a $100,000 signing bonus it's over two or three years but here's $100,000 now we've doubled it and then here's $100,000 in stock so the compensation is now $300,000 it's still $100,000 a year salary and the other things are paid out over several years but you see these compensation numbers that look ridiculous that's what I meant by ridiculous is like they factor in all these things and what I was used to seeing before was absolutely not that the number you would see is your salary some of these things go up like 3x automatically just because of that kind of stuff um do I know a good CPA helps Canada and US taxes I do um I might have to follow up after the stream uh I don't have it off the top of my head but I do know one uh I don't have anything left in Canada so don't have to worry about that okay compensation though yeah so the structure can look very different and again that's not to say that that kind of structure can't exist at startups right especially if a startup has cash injected into it you know they if they want to use that cash to attract talent and they want to compete with you know like what big Tech is offering they're absolutely startups that will say here's a really big salary we know we have to compete our stock options we don't know what those are really valued at but here here's a bunch and sign with us so here's here's extra cash so they can start to put together attractive opportunities how to follow up with me after stream um I am on I'm basically on every platform if uh if you're on X or Twitter or whatever they call it now um You can find me there Dev leader CA just shoot me a a DM on the Twitter or or Instagram you can find me there Tik Tok has messages yeah basically anything look for Dev leader shoot me a message tell me what your YouTube handle is so I know what the context of the conversation is and then I'll I'll message you back yeah happy to help with that so yeah the compensation look wildly different and I think it's important to understand the structure of that right because for me going from a startup to Big Tech was like I I was not familiar with that concept at all so on paper it looks ridiculous as I said but even when I was applying for jobs it was like you know I'm seeing offers from Amazon and it's like I don't how do I compare these job offers someone's saying here's half a million dollars someone else is saying here's you know $100,000 more than that and you're like what like where do these numbers even come from um so yeah it's it was challenging for me and I think that's important to look at and understand that but the the startup part in particular going back to like stock options like those could be worth a ton or they could not be that ties back to risk that we talked about in the beginning you could be taking huge risk on that but um I was I was fortunate in my case right it wasn't a matter of like I just I felt like the entire like from the day I took the interview and walked through the office and they offered me I was like I wasn't like oh this company's going to be the next thing since sliced bread it was more like I know I know this company is not going to fail I know that I'm confident and then as time went on it was like the more the more we put into it the better it does like I felt like I had ownership of the company and I don't mean like I owned it I mean like I felt like I had partial ownership I technically did I had stalking it but I could put more effort in and better things would happen so it was super motivating to do so now that company did go public they went public after I left maybe bad timing they also got B bought back to private for I think $1.8 billion do Canadian so financially I might not have done the right thing but there's an example of a startup that did very well right it's not common that startups have have success or wild success like that so um part of my bias I was at a very good startup great culture and maybe in the last couple minutes that's another thing to touch on is culture I didn't I didn't write that in my notes but I think that's an important one I think that sometimes people perceive like startups have like a scrappy were family kind of culture um my bias is that's how it felt that's just how it felt at the startups I was at and it was good it didn't feel artificial for me and I think the other maybe uh perception that people was like big Tech canot feel like that it's too big there were big you know the teams there's so many teams doing different things like how could it possibly have good culture like that but um I can confident like I was actually worried about this coming to Microsoft and for transparency I was looking at am uh offers from Amazon and Microsoft and having worked at neither I'm just going by what I was able to gather and I had heard people saying like I heard a bunch of stuff that wasn't great about Amazon culture and since then I've Heard lots of people saying it's been great so I think it's situational but I didn't hear a single person saying Microsoft culture has not been good to like to work there I think historically going back maybe 10 years or something it might not have been great any any piece of data that I could collect was just like Microsoft culture is so good I was like okay like I I want to lean into the culture a little bit more and sure enough like not disappointed um something I always share with people is you'll see like Microsoft talking about being inclusive and valuing diversity and if you're on the outside some people might go oh that's that's a big company doing what they got to do but like it's it's a real big thing internally so what's really cool to see is different levels of leadership and management like that is a factor it's not just something that they they stamp and you know make a a post about it on Facebook or something it's like that's part of part of our identity and it's really cool so much so that it goes into um the performance reviews and stuff like that there's literally aspects of having like diverse and inclusive culture included in that so I I think that's super cool um even I'll give you another example and this is maybe a little not so much like big Tech versus startups like something that changed for me going from startups to Big Tech was like this was right around the time where like during the pandemic I don't know if I can say pandemic and my stream's going to like get taken offline or something but um a lot like remote work just like became a thing right away I went from switching jobs where everything was in office open concept to everyone's remote the previous team I was on my entire team worked remotely uh I lived not far from the office but it didn't make sense for me to go there because I would go to the office and then jump on teams and be on calls and on this new team I'm on there are a lot of people that go into the office and like it's like a hybrid thing right they're not just like in the office but a lot of people will go in on certain days and stuff and I don't know like I think that's part of the culture change between the teams because I think there is a lot of value in seeing people in person I am very much like Pro work from home but um I do value seeing people face to face if if we can do it so uh the culture on this team feels very much more um I don't know like not it's not quite like we're family like the startup days because I that's really hard thing to to replicate I think but it just feels more closely knit um so I don't know if that's from being more in office with this team uh there's still there people that are I work with um one of my uh product managers Works remote me can't speak Works remotely from me and I collaborate with him a ton and I feel like we have each other's backs and like that's like a really cool feeling to have on a team so I don't think it's totally iners stuff but where I'm getting at with this tangent is like the culture um you can still have a really cool team culture it's very collaborative very supportive even in big Tech um tended to use one of the examples from the chat earlier like this can be something that's team dependent right organization dependent and in startups like not many teams like you know you kind of have that culture you're all working together or sometimes not maybe you're at a startup and like the culture is kind of crappy and that's probably a good sign it's not probably not going too far the culture is already kind of crappy to begin with but in big Tech with so many teams you might have pockets of teams that are uh maybe not delling so well for any different reasons right and you might have some teams that are just very closely knit there's more diversity in in the types of teams that you're going to see so um something to factor in but culture culture will look different it's it's just not that like one of them is mutually exclusive like only startups can be close-knit and Big Deck must be you know not tightly knit teams um there's just more variety in big Tech you might have some teams that are not but I think that's it that's kind of my rundown of uh startups versus big Tech from my experience if you have watched this and you're still still going well Nick which one do I go apply to told you at the beginning that wasn't the goal to convince you about either I I wanted to give you some things to think about to do your own analysis because I think that's important I think you have to find the type of thing you want to do in work and um yeah I hope I hope that was some amount of insight that helps so let me know um if you have thoughts about other topics you want to see in the next live stream so I'll be doing that on next Monday you can drop those in the chat happy to follow up with those um like I I've said before like I do these because I want to share experiences and stuff with you guys so um if you have topics it makes sense for me to talk about them actually even this one came up from people asking me questions so you know I'm happy to kind of steer the content for what you want so thanks so much for watching you want to learn C I got courses on dome trained for that um this is on a whole bunch of different platforms as well by the way so if uh if you're watching on a platform because you happen to see it but it's not your preferred platform this is literally on LinkedIn YouTube ttch X Instagram Facebook I couldn't do Tik Tok because apparently I need a thousand followers on Tik Tok so you want to follow me on Tik Tok so I can live stream there that would be cool but I I thank you for all your support and uh I will see you next week I hope so take care and enjoy the rest of your week