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What Size Company Is Right for You?

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Small Startup, Mid-Size Company, or Fortune 100? The Pros and Cons Early in my career, I walked into a shared office space on my first day as a full stack software developer and sat down between the CTO and the CEO to get onboarded. There were four of us in total. Before the day was over, I received my first assignment. This was one of the most formative—and most stressful—experiences of my professional life. In the decade since, I have worked at half a dozen companies including Fortune 100 firms, mid-size startups, and companies you’ve probably never heard of. I have also spoken with roughly a thousand developers at various stages of their careers. Most engineers entering the field are obsessed with landing at Google, Meta, or Amazon. But those roles represent approximately 0.6 percent of software engineering positions. For most of us, the real choice is between a small startup, a mid-size company, and a large enterprise. Each comes with tradeoffs, and your experience will differ from mine. What follows is an honest account of what you might reasonably expect. The Small Startup Pros Your work actually matters. A feature you build might determine whether the company closes its next funding round. You gain exposure to the full spectrum of the business, from deployment pipelines to sales and operations and everything in between. You wear many hats out of necessity. For engineers who want to grow quickly and understand how a product is built end to end, few environments move faster. Cons Everything is on fire, always. Work-life balance is difficult to maintain when every release feels critical. Priorities shift without warning and culture tends to reflect the personality of whoever has the most influence in a small room. Startups optimize for speed over craft which means engineers learn to move fast but don’t always learn to build well, and that gap can follow you into your next role. The Mid-Size Company Pros “So this is how a real business works.” There is process, documentation, a quality assurance function, and some form of career structure. The team is large enough to offer a diversity of experience and perspective. Stability is a myth, especially nowadays, but it is considerably more predictable than an early-stage startup. Cons “So this is how a real business works?” Processes that enable quality also produce friction. Access controls, approval workflows, and cross-team dependencies slow things down. The career ladder exists but it might stop at senior engineer. Without significant organizational growth, your salary and title can plateau early. The Large Enterprise Pros That badge on your LinkedIn profile just bought you credibility for the next five years. Compensation at this level can be meaningfully higher, particularly when equity is included. The career ladder is long and clearly defined. Engineering practices at mature organizations tend to be more rigorous, and a well-known employer carries market value in future job searches. Cons It’s slow. Technology stacks often lag industry trends by several years. Political dynamics shape advancement as much as technical ability does. Skill atrophy is a risk when you spend years on a narrow slice of a legacy system. You are now a small fish in a big pond and it will be harder to get noticed. The Roadmap I Would Take If I Could Start Over According to a recent Stack Overflow survey, 47 percent of professional developers work at companies with fewer than 100 employees. This may surprise you because social media is dominated by engineers who work at the most well known companies on the planet. The path most engineers imagine for themselves and the path most engineers actually walk are two very different things. If I could do it again, here’s the path I’d take: Start at a small company to build breadth and learn how a business works across functions. This also provides some room to experiment within different roles. Next, move to a mid-size organization with a clear goal of reaching a senior or leadership role. Making a lateral move is easier than trying to get up-leveled at the next company. Finally, target a more mature company where a leadership position opens the door to meaningful equity and long-term growth (aka stocks and bonuses). Each stop builds something the others cannot. The startup gives you range. The mid-size company gives you a taste of how larger orgs operate. The enterprise gives you leverage, credibility and maybe even some stability. Your path will not look like mine. At a five person startup, I had no idea what I was in for. Looking back, I would not trade it. Just know what you are signing up for before you sign. —Brian Reclaiming Social Engineering for Good “Social engineering” is a concept that has become associated with phishing, in which scammers manipulate people into disclosing personal information. But shaping human behavior in this way doesn’t have to have such negative effects. Systems engineer Guru Madhavan argues that we need to reclaim the term and govern the practice to defend ourselves from bad actors and benefit from social engineering’s good side. Read more here. Get Your Medical Mobile App Verified by IEEE Smartphone apps are increasingly used to help manage medical conditions, but many of these have not been verified by any regulatory agencies. To help ensure these apps are credible, the IEEE Standards Association recently launched a directory listing apps that have been vetted by experts for technical soundness, ethical design, data security and privacy, and clinical efficacy. The registry will be publically available at no cost, and developers can now apply for approval. Read more here. Finding Success in Industry as a Chip Designer A veteran chip designer reflects on what he learned when moving from academia to industry, where the goal changes from proof of concept to ensuring a design works reliably at scale. Differences in risk tolerance, he discovered, lead to varying approaches in the rapidly growing semiconductor industry. Read more here.

The Computer Science Degree Isn’t Dead

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! The CS Degree Isn’t Dead. The Entry-Level Pipeline Is There is no shortage of people telling recent engineering graduates that their degree was a mistake and that AI is coming for their jobs before they even land one. I respectfully disagree. I have been a software engineer for 12 years, done well over 100 interviews on both sides of the table, and run Parsity, an AI engineering program. A few patterns emerge consistently in who actually breaks through in today’s job market. Here’s why I think the job market isn’t as dire as it looks, and what I would do if I were looking for my first tech job. The Numbers Need Context The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently placed unemployment for recent CS graduates in the United States at 6.1 percent, with computer engineering graduates at 7.5 percent. Compared to philosophy majors at 3.2 percent and art history graduates at 3.0 percent, those figures look alarming. They require more context than most headlines provide. When researchers factor in underemployment (graduates working jobs that don’t require a college degree), then engineers are doing relatively well, coming in below 20 percent, against a 42 percent average across all recent graduates. Many majors reporting lower unemployment are achieving that figure by accepting work entirely unrelated to their field. Scored across unemployment, underemployment, and early-career earnings together, CS and computer engineering still rank among the top fields for overall labor market outcomes. The degree is not the problem. The hiring pipeline is. Job postings labeled “entry-level software engineer” grew roughly 47 percent between late 2023 and late 2024, while actual hiring into those roles dropped approximately 73 percent in the same window. So-called “ghost jobs,” used to create an illusion of company growth, are everywhere. This makes the front door harder to find, but it exists. Here Is What To Do About It Do a broad search of your (real-life) network. Roughly 26 percent of job offers come through referrals. Look at your actual network—classmates, professors, past internship contacts, relatives—and identify people at companies that might be hiring. The goal is a warm introduction to someone who is or knows a decision maker. One introduction carries more weight than a hundred cold applications through a portal. Find symmetric risk. A junior engineer is a risky hire by definition. A startup carries a matching risk profile, meaning potentially lower compensation, no certainty of longevity, and higher performance expectations. But that shared risk creates mutual interest. The learning curve is steep, the exposure is broad, and the track record transfers directly. For engineers whose longer-term goal is a large organization, a startup is not a detour. It can be how you build the experience those organizations eventually want to see. The first job is for validation and learning. It is not a life sentence. Manufacture experience rather than waiting for it. Employers want experience but will not hire you to get it. The way through is to create it: a deployed project, an open-source contribution, building something real for a small business or family member. Recruiters are skeptical of toy projects. A deployed application solving a real problem, combined with the ability to talk clearly about the decisions you made and why, still moves the needle. Gain practical AI engineering skills, not just AI tool fluency. Using Cursor or Copilot is now a baseline expectation. What differentiates candidates is going one level deeper. Most working engineers, including senior ones, have not built a RAG pipeline or designed a multi-agent system. Understanding how to chunk documents, generate embeddings, store and query them from a vector database, and wire it into a production application puts a candidate ahead of a significant portion of the market on a skill in rapidly growing demand. AI and data science roles grew 163 percent in job postings in 2025. The engineers who understand how these systems actually work, not just how to prompt them, are in the shortest supply. Stop optimizing around conditions you cannot predict. Nobody anticipated the 2021 hiring boom. Nobody predicted this correction. Build durable skills. The demand for engineers who can reason clearly about systems is not going away. Where you start is not where you end. —Brian Meta and Microsoft have joined the layoff tsunami. Is AI really to blame? More major workforce reductions are on the horizon at Big Tech companies: Meta announced it will cut 10 percent of its workforce, or about 8,000 employees, and Microsoft plans to offer buyouts for 7 percent of its U.S. employees in a voluntary retirement program. The cuts are understood by many to be linked to AI. But is AI really to blame? For The Conversation, two academics at the University of Sydney give their two cents. Read more here. This Roboticist-Turned-Teacher Built a Life-Size Replica of ENIAC Tom Burick got his start as a roboticist. But when a financial downturn forced him to close his robotics business, he thought of the effect teachers had on his life and decided to pay it forward. Burick now works as a technology instructor at a school for students with autism, where he recently led a project building a full-scale replica of ENIAC, an historic computer celebrating its 80th anniversary this year. Read more here. Proposed Chinese Robot Ban is Latest U.S. Tech Sovereignty Move Across several industries, the United States has been moving toward limiting the use of sensitive technology made in China. Now, legislation has been introduced to extend the trend to ground robots, including humanoids, dogs, and crawlers. This could benefit some U.S.-based robotics firms—but many of these companies still rely on Chinese-made components. “The U.S. robotics industry is in a pickle,” writes Spectrum tech policy editor Lucas Laursen. Read more here.

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