[BoxFour]

> Take the bits you want (money, skills)

That’s exactly what the author did, and it’s why the leveling piece matters so much.

At big tech companies levels very directly control comp, and less directly control the scope of problems you’re trusted with.

You absolutely can tackle large, high-impact problems as a more junior IC, but it usually means pushing a lot harder to hold onto ownership. Otherwise it’s REAL easy for a more senior IC to step in and quietly take it over.

[mgaunard]

It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position.

Though most people into entrepreneurship never go back to big corporations usually.

[kace91]

>acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack

This is not usually how it works. In fact in my experience, the moment a company becomes a scaleup and brings new leadership in to handle growth, those people start getting rid of the hacky jack of all trades profiles.

Larger companies usually value specialized profiles. They don’t benefit from someone half assing 20 roles, they have the budget to get 20 experts to whole ass one role each.

Career paths in large companies usually have some variation of “I’m the go-to expert for a specific area” as a bullet point somewhere.

[BoxFour]

Big tech companies are also notorious for down-leveling if you’re not coming from another big company, so it might not actually be that good of a move.

[raw_anon_1111]

It doesn’t work like that. An “architect” at a small startup will get you maybe to a mid level position at BigTech if you pass the coding interview. The scale is completely different.

And those “entrepreneurs” usually make less than a senior enterprise dev working in a 2nd tier city or a new grad at BigTech.