I worked at Google and Microsoft and left both of them and started my own company precisely because of how hard it is to get anything done at bigger companies, and comparatively speaking Google is one of the less "bureaucratic" companies to work for with much less friction compared to the other FAANG companies.
Working at a start up company allows you to be far more productive than at a bigger company. You are not shoehorned into any particular position and you need to be able to excel at multiple areas and be able to switch gears rapidly. One month I'm using React/TypeScript to implement new front-end web pages, and then the next month I'm working on improving the green-thread scheduler we use for our backend systems in C++, and then after that I jump into Kotlin to work on the mobile version of our app. All of the developers here are able to work across the different projects and pick what areas they want to, some choose to focus just on a particular area and that's fine, but others can jump across a variety of different technologies, and as I own the company I like to get involved in a little bit of everything.
At Google, I'd be lucky to be working on one narrow facet of one of those areas over the course of a year.
Startups are absolutely not for everyone and they can lead to burn out, as is evident from many posts to HN, but for people who really want to immerse themselves in tech and want to work on a variety of different technologies I just can't see working at a bigger company comparing to it. That said it's definitely true that if I didn't have Google/MS on my resume, no one would have taken my startup seriously, so it's worth getting some experience at FAANG for the credential, and then jumping ship after a couple of years if the opportunity arises. Also there were nice things about Google as an environment, like tech talks, and I absolutely miss Testing on the Toilet. You can recreate some of that at a smaller company but the scale at which Google is able to do it is very impressive and hard to replicate. That said you can always go back to FAANG and recruiters from both companies are just an email away.
Working at a start up company allows you to be far more productive than at a bigger company. You are not shoehorned into any particular position and you need to be able to excel at multiple areas and be able to switch gears rapidly. One month I'm using React/TypeScript to implement new front-end web pages, and then the next month I'm working on improving the green-thread scheduler we use for our backend systems in C++, and then after that I jump into Kotlin to work on the mobile version of our app. All of the developers here are able to work across the different projects and pick what areas they want to, some choose to focus just on a particular area and that's fine, but others can jump across a variety of different technologies, and as I own the company I like to get involved in a little bit of everything.
At Google, I'd be lucky to be working on one narrow facet of one of those areas over the course of a year.
Startups are absolutely not for everyone and they can lead to burn out, as is evident from many posts to HN, but for people who really want to immerse themselves in tech and want to work on a variety of different technologies I just can't see working at a bigger company comparing to it. That said it's definitely true that if I didn't have Google/MS on my resume, no one would have taken my startup seriously, so it's worth getting some experience at FAANG for the credential, and then jumping ship after a couple of years if the opportunity arises. Also there were nice things about Google as an environment, like tech talks, and I absolutely miss Testing on the Toilet. You can recreate some of that at a smaller company but the scale at which Google is able to do it is very impressive and hard to replicate. That said you can always go back to FAANG and recruiters from both companies are just an email away.