Ask YC: Internet Startup or Big Powerhouse for a summer internship?

If you have never worked for a major corporation, I would suggest taking the job at the major corporation. You will have gained real-world experience and the drive to never work for a major corporation ever again.<p>I recommend working for a major corporation at the early part of your career because you will learn that inside a major corporation you are nothing but a cog in the machine. If you are happy doing that type of work then life for you is set. If you are not happy doing that type of work, then you now have the adult-equivalent of "don't touch that!" branded into your soul.<p>In essence, the only way to know what type of person you are, start-up or big corporation, is to test the waters at a big corporation. The other way around doesn't work in my opinion because you need a stable environment in which to formulate a decision, and a startup would simply have to many unknowns to formulate the decision properly.

If you go with a Big Powerhouse in a vertical silo, you may learn enough about the business to create a startup. My first startup was based on my 12-month experience at an established software company, where I learned the market and built a better mousetrap that competed with their software.

I have never interned in a startup environment, but I can provide some insight into what it's like to work for a corporation. I participated in my school's coop program, which allow me to work at IBM for ~9 months in programming/design. Working in a corporation is everything you expect: very slow, process-oriented, very little responsibility. Doesn't matter how hard you drive your manager for work, it's unlikely you will get anything substantial unless you take the initiative yourself. I can't say I learned a lot in terms of hard technical skills (you will learn much more in school), but I have learned some very valuable soft skills -- how to coordinate work with others (it's surprisingly difficult when you are only coding a small piece of work that belongs to something much larger), how to present in front of senior managers, etc. One of the most valuable lesson I learned is to comment your code, I remember back in school, my professors tried to drive that concept into our heads, but I always thought, why do I need to comment when I know the code by heart? Nothing makes you realize the importance of comment until when you try to debug someone else's code, and the genius name variables after his children (serious, no joke).<p>There are valuable lessons to be learned in a huge corporation. They are procedures, how to coordinate work, how bureaucracy works, and the most important lesson I learned is -- I dislike it and I will never want to program in a big corporation environment.<p>From what I have heard and read, you will learn much more in a start up environment. You may not just do programming or design, but you have the opportunity to get involved with marketing, advertising, etc. But at the same time, you won't see the picture of what makes corporations successful at what they do. If I have to do it all over again, I would probably intern at a start up because there are more learning opportunities. Corporations are very silo-ed, every department operates on its own and it's very hard for interns to touch any other pieces of work. (e.g. if you are a programming intern, chances are you won't have a chance to do marketing as well).<p>Hope that helps.

I'm a junior at the University of Washington, and I was faced with similar decisions last summer and this summer. Last summer, I went with the Big Powerhouse, and I was pretty disappointed. It wasn't challenging, I wasn't working on interesting stuff, and I wasn't really learning anything. This summer, I'm going with the Internet Startup, and all indications seem to be that it will be a much better time.<p>Then again, my Big Powerhouse was Microsoft, so that may have had something to do with it. Even so, you can look at it in terms of the affect you'll have on the company as a whole. If you're in the Big Powerhouse, you're doing 1/1000th of the work. If you're in the Internet Startup, you're doing 1/30th. This means you'll be working on more important (and thus probably more interesting) stuff.

If you want to learn lessons, work at the big company.<p>If you want to learn skills, work at the small company.

Last summer I did an internship at, ummm, Steve Jobs's current venture. It wasn't a good fit for me, but that had nothing to do with the size of the company. The position simply wasn't a good match for my skills and experience. I was offered a full-time job as a result of the internship, but since it wasn't a good match, I turned it down.<p>That said, my feelings about the internship had little to do with the size of the company. The perks of a big-company internship were great, and you can meet a lot of other interesting hackers through a larger internship program. Also, all my previous jobs were at much smaller companies, so it was great to experience life at a large tech company first-hand. Life at the large company wasn't really any different than life at smaller companies.<p>I would suggest picking the job that interests you the most, based on the team or the project you'd be working on, and the quality of the individuals you'd be working with. The most important aspect of an internship should be the work you do. That will be the most important factor in how much you like it, and that's what you can show off in future job interviews. Plus, internships often lead to full-time jobs, and you won't want to make that decision solely based on the reputation or size of the company.

Is the big company a "brand name", i.e. something that the general computing public has heard of? If so, I'd definitely go big-company: it's an additional credential on your resume that can open doors for future internships or employment.<p>Otherwise, it depends a lot on the companies involved and your specific situation. I agree with other posters that you should, at some point, <i>try</i> a big company and see if it's right for you before jumping into startups. OTOH, you'll learn many more skills at a startup, and will probably have a more exciting time. If you plan to do hobby or open-source programming, a startup is also more likely to improve your chops.<p>Something else to consider: at a startup, you'll often have access to the full existing source code repository, and the tree will be small enough that you can understand most of it. At a big company, you'll probably be silo'd into a single project with its own repository, or worse, use no source control at all. Some of my best programming lessons have come from reading other people's source code; I got lots of that when I worked for startups, and very little interning for large companies.

Personally, I would go with the startup. If I can, I never want to work at a stereotypical, large corporation. On the other hand, if I did go to the large company in your situation, it might give me that much more drive to getting my first product launched as I would have experienced cubicle-land, office politics, and all of the other things that people complain so much about.

Based on the multiple articles I have read (PG, Marc Andreessen), these are the factors I use in making a decision:<p>1. Personal value of a particular experience<p>2. Market for the product being built<p>3. The people at the company, ideally there are lots of smart people you can learn from<p>4. The product being built<p>5. Compensation (Salary + stock + benefits)<p>Personally, I would pick the startup. If all goes well, I would work a few hours through the fall and spring as well.<p>good luck!

Thanks to everyone that replied. My friend made a great comment today when he pointed out that, for the most part, people go to work at startups so that they can get in on the ground floor - pull those extra hours and accept less pay because hopefully you will be able to build the company out into a moneymaking venture. As an intern, those reasons are absent, since you're leaving shortly after you start with no stock or any other "i was there first"goodies anyways.<p>On the other hand, the web startup is probably more along the lines of what I would like to be doing long term, and one of the founders is already assuming a mentorship position - he called me a couple of times, and rather than trying to push his side, he's giving me some guidance and opinions on how to approach this kind of decision. This is, naturally, great for a student like me.<p>Still undecided, but i'll probably make up my mind throughout the night. Thank you for the candid discussion everyone!

If you want to learn about technology then work at the smaller company. If you want to learn about business processes then work at the larger company. However, you'd learn more from the smaller company if it only had 7-10 people. Furthermore, you can learn about technology in your own time. Therefore, I'd recommend working in the larger company.

I am in a similar situation, so I can't offer you any opinion from experience, but I'll share the reasoning I used in making my decision:<p>A large company can afford to hire you as an investment. Most lower-year students can't offer a whole lot to a company, but to BigCo it's like buying options in you as a future full-time employee. (Not that you are not obligated to keep going on full time, but many students will) I've heard many stories of people spending their summers at the big companies, getting paid well, but working on things that never saw the light of day.<p>A small company, on the other hand, can't afford to do that. Any work you do will have to be important to the company.

<i>"... Should I spend my summer at a small (30 people) startup or at a reasonably big (1000 people) CS/Art company? ..."</i><p>Internship hey.<p>It's not real work. If you go to SoftCo it might be a chance to improve an existing product niche like Flemlord suggests. But if you try a startup (30's a lot &#38; I'd call this big) you might just see how hard you really have to work and learn something new as well.<p>If it was me I'd pick the one that gives you the <i>"best payoff"</i> for working up-wind in the future.

two responses, two opinions - probably very much in the gist of my question! good point on both of those though!<p>A little bit of background - I've already worked at Yahoo! for a year, so I have an idea of cubicle-land as kingnothing puts it. I do want to point out that the big company in question is not at all the typical big company. Without making it _too_ obvious, its one of Steve Jobs' previous ventures...

It would surely depend on what your longer term goals are. Do you want to set up your own start up? if so, go for the start up option. Being in a smaller company also exposes you to a wider area of activities, which can also be a great advantage, especially if you hope to one day start up your own thing.

My big company internship was really boring and I mostly just read sites like Hacker News a lot. Make sure the match is right and that they actually need an intern. Sometimes they just hire you because you want to be hired and you end up doing mostly nothing.<p>Thats just my 2 cents though.

Go startup if you're ambitious, you'll learn much more (more work too)<p>The big powerhouse will be a nice line on your resume, but most of the time, nothing more.

Seems like the big company can lend you some perspective that might be handy later on. :-)

startup. it will allow you to express yourself more, be yourself, enjoy a more relaxed and motivated environment. I work at a major corporation that was more of a startup when I joined and I prefer it the way it was years ago.