Corporate Benefits:

- While a lot of folks look at bureaucracy as a huge drawback, in retrospect, I learned a lot about how to influence people and trying to see all sides of an argument.

- In some cases, it can be freeing to work for a big corporate environment if you manage to find yourself on a team with a green field project. It's got a lot of benefits that startups have with little to no risk of failure.

- Structure can be good for some folks, especially early in your career if you haven't got the slightest clue what you're interested in doing long term. I view it sort of like bootcamp for the military - you get a routine, you learn to function as a group, without the stress of needing to survive.

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Corporate Drawbacks:

- Bureaucracy - it can be utterly draining. Some fights feel like such a slog for minute improvements.

- It's easy to get lost in the mix - bosses can change frequently if an organization is unhealthy, team members bail, and product groups fall apart. The healthiest corporate groups can be incredibly freeing to work in and the worst corporate groups can really burn out your creativity because it turns into monotony.

- Golden handcuffs - I walked away from a big chunk of money when I went to startup land. It wasn't easy but ultimately it was the right choice.

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Startup Benefits:

- More work than you have people to do it. There's always something to do, you never end up with busy work, and you're almost always learning something you didn't know the day before about the business or your technology.

- Smaller groups that feel more like family and less like work. I get to work with my friends, people that I'd hang out with outside of work. That can be a double edged sword, but for me I enjoy it.

- Closer connection to the customer. At a big corporate job, you're so far removed from your customers as an engineer that it can be very isolating. For startups, you often interact with a customer if something's broken or a customer wants a new feature. I enjoy that a lot.

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Startup Drawbacks:

- More work than you have people to do it. If you don't set good boundaries and have a good culture of identifying the most important thing to be done, everything can feel like a "tyranny" of the urgent.

- Pay is lower, especially at earlier stages. I'm not terribly obsessed with money. I like to have money to travel and enough to get a few things I want but expensive cars or collecting guitars isn't my jam.

- Unpredictability - Business needs change quickly as you fight for deals, you experiment or cut features to try and drive costs down. It can feel like you built something and then aggressively cut it prematurely.

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These are just my notes on it - and really it's stream of consciousness. I'm sure if I sat down to write a real blog post, it'd probably be a little better reasoned.