STARTUP VS BIG TECH: What's the difference?
In the article I delve into what it was like to be a part of a second-stage startup and the benefits and challenges I faced versus when I started in big tech.
History
For those of you who don’t know, before I ventured into Microsoft, I had previously worked at a couple of startups.
To give you some context, at my last company Tappit, what we were building was essentially a rewrite of a product they had previously outsourced. They wanted to rewrite it because the previous product wasn’t easy to work with, was difficult to make configuration changes to, and it was written entirely in Python (I think, also that’s not a bad thing don’t @ me).
Even though the existing platform was written in Python, the team that they hired were .NET engineers, as they wanted to integrate the new platform into their other platform that they had also started to build.
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with events where you are given RFID tags, but the idea of our product was that:
You can top up your account before you go to the event via a customer portal.
You will be given a QR code, that allows you to load your current balance.
You can then load that money onto a tag given to you at the event using the QR code.
You can then use that money to purchase items at the event and go into specific areas.
You can then go onto the portal and cash out any money you didn’t spend during the event, afterwards.
The portal was able to be white labelled by our clients and we could change the way it looked depending on their branding scheme.
The events could also be supported offline, given the nature of the work we were doing, as we were targeting a lot of festivals that typically have bad network reception.
The idea was that the event was able to be fully cashless, which protected the event staff and vendors during the event.
There was a lot more too it and this is a very simplified view for the purposes of the article, but it was a super fun project to be a part of and there was A LOT of work that needed to be done, in a short space of time.
Anyway, I’ve talked enough about Tappit, let’s get into the pros/cons!
Learning
When you’re at a big tech company, especially when starting in entry-level roles, the learning tends to be much more structured. You have access to a lot of training materials and a lot of time during your working day to dedicate to proper training.
For example at Microsoft we have access to Pluralsight and LinkedIn Learning, as well as things like co-pilot to help us work effectively. Whereas at Tappit, every license mattered and needed to be justified. I ended up doing a lot of training out of my own money during that time, such as buying A Cloud Guru (now part of Pluralsight) to study for my Azure certifications.
One of the things I really appreciate about Microsoft is the time I have to learn things properly, I get to study and understand what it is that I need to build and what are the things that I need to do to build it the right way.
When working at a startup, you typically have a lot more hands-on learning instead, now that doesn’t mean I don’t learn a lot through hands-on work in my current role, I absolutely do. But you can’t compare structured and paced learning versus being thrown in across the stack.
If I needed to work on the customer portal, I worked on the customer portal.
If I need to help configure the load balancer for the customer portal in AWS, then I did just that.
If I needed to work on the pipelines, then I did just that.
If I needed to work on the administrative portal or the backend microservices, then I did just that.
If I needed to work on the RFID devices and tags, then I did just that.
And it wasn’t just about doing all of those things, it was doing all those things at fast pace.
I remember coming back from America after we had just had our first event, which was a mess btw (more about that another time), and being told we needed to deliver cash-out by an event happening in two weeks time.
For those unfamiliar, cash-out is basically the ability to withdraw the remaining funds that is currently on the customer’s portal account. If they didn’t spend it at the event, they were able to get it back.
An entirely new payment gateway feature with stripe, that we hadn’t ever done before, needed to be delivered in two weeks. We had to research the possible ways of doing it with stripe, it turns out you can do it a multitude of ways but the refunds option was the most suitable for our scenario. Well actually, we used something called unlinked refunds, as this meant a user could top their account up multiple times and cash out all in the same transaction, however this feature had to be specifically enabled for us on request.
My colleagues and I worked closely together to understand just how exactly what we were going to use, how we were going to use it, do a proof of concept, tie it into the product, have the appropriate transactions created, as well as creating the appropriate flow in the front end and get an email template put together and sent out on successful cash out, without incurring loads of technical debt.
I remember a big part of my role back then was being the glue that tied the various parts of what the team did together, and I loved it.
And my god did we do it, and it actually worked quite beautifully.
That type of learning is something you just don’t experience unless it’s bred out of necessity.
Structure
If you like structure, a startup is probably not the place for you.
In fact, even in a second stage startup, you’ll find that you’re typically being brought in to help shape the structure.
Backlogs are a little all over the place, you’re not really sure what you’re delivering week on week.
In fact, it all goes out the window when a new priority comes in, that the sales team have told you absolutely needs to be done by next week.
And if you don’t do it, that will be the end of the business and life as we know it.
Only for you to do it and then be told that actually its not a priority anymore because they’ve lost that lead.
Oh fun.
On the other hand in big tech there can be a lot of process and structure, you can be waiting for weeks to be unblocked on something you’re working on with the customer, and you have to find pragmatic ways around it.
In a startup, you’re typically never blocked by anything you can’t control yourself.
I remember Maho Pacheco and I co-owning a project in a hackathon, and having to jump through various hoops to get it available as open source. Well actually, Maho went through all the hoops because he is way more awesome than me and I gave up with it.
There are some benefits that come with process though, for example it is nice to have a well structured backlog and clarity on what your upcoming projects are going to be. Whilst you might not have the backlog fully spec’ed out, you know what is needed of you in the upcoming months and that is unlikely to change.
One thing I would say is to determine what you prefer more, because there’s definitely trade offs and benefits to both.
Salary
I can imagine that this is probably one of the biggest factors for most people…
I think there’s no beating around the bush here, typically a big tech company can afford to pay more than a startup, a startup typically doesn’t have the same budget for.
When I was at Tappit I was the Lead Engineer for the RFID product and also line managed four of the engineers.
When I moved to Microsoft I got a 40% pay increase (20% salary, plus an additional 20% if you include bonus and stocks).
For a role with much less responsibilities (Lead Engineer → Software Engineer II)
Note: It’s important to mention that I didn’t join Microsoft with that in mind, I would have actually been fine on the same pay, but have very strict policies when it comes to offering market rate.
My experience may be different to others though, I went from a startup in Leeds, to a big tech company in London, a more fair comparison may be comparing a startup salary in London.
However, from what I’ve observed this seems to be quite common.
Benefits
So typically a lot of big tech companies offer stock and various benefits in their packages. For example, I got both on-hire stocks as well as annual stocks.
One of the things that I thought was really good was the maternity package, I really loved how Microsoft pay their new employees a decent maternity package if they join whilst pregnant.
I was super thrilled to know I wasn’t going to be going onto maternity not getting paid, but in actual fact I was going to be getting paid the same, it removed so much stress from my life.
But it’s not just the benefits in terms of things like monetary, you get access to a wealth of information such as networking with others, learning libraries, licensing for tools, these things make such a difference in your day to day work.
Touching on startups, I think some startups offer compensation in the form of stock or equity, but there’s a much higher element of risk to that in comparison to big tech companies.
Not to say there isn’t any risk with those either, it’s just a higher risk with a startup.
For example, the timing for me leaving Tappit actually worked quite well, literally a month after I handed in my notice, half of my direct reports had been made redundant and a handful of others across the business, which is always a risk when your startup is in a seed funding phase.
On the opposite side of that, if the startup blows up, you have the chance of being a millionaire overnight, wouldn’t that be fun?
There were a few other benefits I remember from Tappit that I enjoyed, getting to visit the events was one of them, you got to truly see how users were using your product, and deal with the stress that the operations team deals with, it was an awesome experience.
Balance
If you want to work at a startup, balance isn’t always easy.
I mean if you haven’t already guessed I’m a bit of workaholic, so it was never so much of an issue for me, but I definitely saw it take it’s toll on others.
It was relatively common to do weekends on-call, this was when most of the events took place and so you had to be there to support. We didn’t really have first, second or third line support, so we were the support.
You might think this was a negative but it was actually a great way to understand how the product was being used, it gave you live feedback on how the product was performing and what things needed to be looked at in the following sprint.
As well as that it gave you an appreciation of things many can take for granted, good logging and metrics, ability to make quick necessary changes to the system. I think our operations team were thrilled when it took us a couple of minutes to update the menus of one of our vendors, in the old system this would have needed a code change, but they were able to do this themselves after we showed them how.
I don’t really have to do anything like that anymore, and sometimes I miss it, in all honesty, it was an adrenaline rush.
And then other times I’m just extremely grateful of the work life balance I get to have today.
I don’t have to do any out-of-hours, we sometimes meet our customers when projects start and end, but in all honesty this is really fun to do as we get to build relationships with them.
Usually as long as we achieve the impact we need to for our customers, then we are good and the business is happy.
Growth
In a startup you have to learn a lot, and this gives you a lot of opportunity. If the startup does well you can easily climb your way up the ladder in a couple of years as the business scales.
This is because you end up having to learn a lot about the product domain and fast, because you work at such breadth with different things, you can end up being a subject matter expert relatively quickly, allowing you to move into more senior roles when they come up.
There’s typically not much in terms of process or structure into what constitutes a certain level either.
However, in big tech that’s less likely to be the case, promotions are a lot more structured and you have to meet certain targets to get to certain levels.
It’s clear what you need to do to reach that next level and how to achieve that, but there’s also more competition for those senior roles as you grow through the business.
Both have their benefits and drawbacks, it all depends on what’s more important to you.
Summary
That’s my comparison based on my experiences of working at both a startup and big tech!
I really loved working at a startup, and I would definitely recommend it for anyone who wants to accelerate their learning and development as I think it’s a fantastic place grow your skills.
I feel like I grew so much as a developer, very, very quickly.
All I would stress is, ensure you’re able to handle ambiguity, you also have to be careful not to burn yourself out.
For me however? I personally love the work-life balance that working at Microsoft gives me as well as the ability to work on the many different projects that I get to work on. There’s so much variety and learning and I’m super happy I made the decision to work here.
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By Neo Kim
Thanks for the mention! For the record I don't think I am more awesome than you. I do think startup is a nice fast-paced environment to learn, and I enjoy finding those similar opportunities inside Microsoft powered by The Garage. Good insights!
Great read, Jade! I’ve worked in both worlds and I like more the startup world as you can focus more on the bigger picture and you can have more impact.
I was lucky to have plenty of early experiences in bigger companies where you can have more structured learning and access to mentors.
For juniors I would recommend to stay away from startups until they master the fundamentals and became a well rounded developer.