Having spent time as a software engineer in a large tech company and later launching my own company, I’m often asked which experience is “better.”
The honest answer is: they’re both exciting, deeply fulfilling in different ways, and not really comparable.
Being a software engineer in a big company
Working in a big company feels like being a cog in an incredible, well-oiled machine. And I don’t mean “cog” in a negative way.
The machine is complex, powerful, and built by thousands of highly skilled people. Your role is clearly defined. You are expected to go deep, specialize, and deliver excellence within your scope. When something breaks, there’s a process:
- You identify the issue
- You report it
- It moves through product managers, designers, tech leads, and prioritization cycles
Your responsibility often ends at reporting clearly and correctly. Someone else owns the decision, someone else owns the fix, and that’s by design. This separation of concerns is what allows large organizations to scale.
Something is reassuring about this. You can focus on engineering problems, grow technically, and learn from incredibly talented peers. The impact is massive, even if it’s sometimes indirect.
Launching your own company
Starting your own company feels very different.
Instead of being a cog in a large machine, you’re building a much smaller machine from scratch. And at the beginning, you are most of the parts.
The boundaries between roles are blurry or nonexistent. You might notice a product issue, report it to yourself, prioritize it, design the solution, implement it, deploy it, and then answer the support ticket that comes in afterward.
There’s no “this isn’t my job.”
Even if your official role is “software engineer” or “founder,” reality doesn’t care. If something needs fixing and you’re the best person to do it, then that’s what you’ll do.
This can be exhausting, but it’s also incredibly energizing. You see the full lifecycle of decisions. You feel the consequences immediately. The feedback loop is short and very real.
Two exciting, very different journeys
What I’ve learned is that these two worlds shouldn’t be compared as better or worse.
They’re simply different journeys:
- Big companies teach you scale, rigor, and depth
- Startups teach you ownership, adaptability, and breadth
One is about mastering your part of the system.
The other is about making sure the system works at all.
Both are exciting. Both are challenging. And both shape you in ways that stay with you.
The important thing isn’t choosing the “right” path, but understanding what kind of journey you’re on, and why you chose it.
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