[dpres]

jimmyjazz14, I too worked for a large Fortune 200 company until moving to SV and working for a successful startup.

"working at a large company has meant I get to focus solely on the thing I care most about, programming"

There is a difference in just programming and efficient programming. You might be surprised how much time you spend doing unneeded programming that could be done more efficiently.

"plus I get a steady paycheck"

There's almost no risk at a successful startup. I remember people worrying about restructuring or layoffs at the large company... here everyone is too busy solving problems to worry about layoffs.

"It has also allowed me to learn a lot of new and interesting concepts (particularly dealing with scale) that one generally only finds in really large companies."

There are few large corporations where individual programmers actually deal with scale and if they do it's usually using old patterns. The successful startup I work for now has me dealing with(as a team) more 'big data' scale problems than I ever did working at a large corporation. I am also able to use newer technology and design patterns to solve those scale problems where the large corporation already had a standard outdated solution.

Bottom line, you don't have to settle for a large corporation to get job security and challenging problems when many successful startups offer the same benefits. I was a passionless drone working at a large corporation and since moving to SV I have never looked back.

[snow_mac]

I'm going to graduate in a year. How do I prove my skills to get a great job at a stable startup?