Should you join a startup or Big Tech out of college? An OpenAI engineer weighs in.
Janvi Kalra, an engineer at OpenAI, thinks students should diversify their experiences after college, with at least one internship at a Big Tech firm and another at a startup.
That way, she said on an episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast, you have a better idea of what career path you should take.
Kalra interned with Microsoft and Google. She then worked for productivity startup Coda before transitioning into her current role at OpenAI. She said both tracks have advantages and disadvantages.
"The way I saw it, the upside of going to Big Tech was, first, you learn how to build reliable software for scale," Kalra said. "It's very different to build something that works, versus build something that works when it's swarmed with millions of requests from around the world and Redis happens to be down at the same time. Very different skills."
Another good thing about Big Tech, she added, was the amount of time she got to work on projects that were under less pressure to immediately succeed.
"Different upside for Big Tech in general was that you do get to work on more moonshot projects that aren't making money today," Kalra said. "They don't have the same existential crisis that startups do."
And then, of course, more practically, were the financial upsides — including potential prestige.
"There are also practical, good reasons to go to Big Tech," Kalra added. "I'd get my green card faster. I'd get paid more on average. And the unfortunate reality, I think, is that the role does hold more weight. People are more excited about hiring an L5 Google engineer versus an L5 from a startup, especially if that startup doesn't become very successful."
Still, Kalra said, there are "great reasons" to go to a startup, like the sheer amount of experience you'll get with programming itself.
"First, you just ship so much code, right?" she said. "There are more problems than people, and so you get access to these zero-to-one greenfield problems that you wouldn't necessarily get at Big Tech maybe where there are more people than problems."
She said another advantage is the wide array of challenges that'll be thrown at you, allowing you to develop expertise on several fronts.
"Second is the breadth of skills — and this is not just in the software engineering space," she said. "Right from a software engineering space, maybe one quarter you're working on a growth hacking front-end feature, and the next quarter you're writing Terraform. But even in terms of the non-technical skills, you get an insight into how the business works."
Startups also afford you more responsibility, along with a better chance of materially affecting the company with your work, she said.
"You just get more agency in what you work on," she said. "You get the opportunity to propose ideas that you think would be impactful for the business and go execute on it."
Given the opportunity, Kalra said it's best to gain experience with both startups and larger firms as early in your career as possible.
"Given that Big Tech and startups are such different experiences and you learn so much at each, it would be more educational to do one startup internship and one Big Tech internship to get a very robust overview of what both experiences are like very early," she said.
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