I disagree with most of this. I've been posting words to this effect a lot recently, but as a prospective employee, I think there's currently a false dichotomy between startup and big company.
There are plenty of companies in between "2 guys in a garage hacking" and "giant megacorp". Many of these - even late stage or well funded startups, although the word startup becomes blurry at this point - are big enough to satisfy all five of the author's reasons for joining a big company.
For example, consider a 4 or 5 person engineering team at a well funded startup, or a recently profitable/break-even late stage startup. You can probably specialize in something you're passionate about, have an impressive entry on your resume, make a competitive salary, make relationships, and learn from smart people. In fact, I would argue you'd probably do at least three of these things better at a small company than at a large company. If your ambition is to be a typical career person, then you'll have lots of advancement opportunities if you get in closer to the ground floor. If your ambition is to be an entrepreneur, then you can learn from your bosses, who have already succeeded at what you want to be doing.
As engineers, the market is in our favor at the moment. You don't necessarily need to forfeit equity or ground-floor opportunities for salary and stability.
Let's say you are a founder at a small startup. You are looking for the best talent. Rarely do you have thousands of people knocking at your door asking for a position. You have to go out and look for the best people. You will find yourself in one of three positions:
A) Not finding enough people -- then you have the ability to interview everyone, and any candidate may have a chance of getting in the door.
B) Finding too many people -- then you don't have the bandwidth to interview everyone, and you need some sort of heuristic to decide who to interview first. This is where pedigree comes in.
C) Outsourcing to a third party recruiting firm -- generally, even if you instruct them not to, they will send you candidates with strong pedigrees
There are ways of distinguishing yourself and building pedigree without spending the first years of your career at megacorp. Education, side projects, introductions, etc. If you can't create one of these distinguishing factors for yourself, you probably don't belong at a startup anyway.
In general, I think the issues of "Where should I work?" and "How do I get noticed/hired?" are very separate issues.
There are plenty of companies in between "2 guys in a garage hacking" and "giant megacorp". Many of these - even late stage or well funded startups, although the word startup becomes blurry at this point - are big enough to satisfy all five of the author's reasons for joining a big company.
For example, consider a 4 or 5 person engineering team at a well funded startup, or a recently profitable/break-even late stage startup. You can probably specialize in something you're passionate about, have an impressive entry on your resume, make a competitive salary, make relationships, and learn from smart people. In fact, I would argue you'd probably do at least three of these things better at a small company than at a large company. If your ambition is to be a typical career person, then you'll have lots of advancement opportunities if you get in closer to the ground floor. If your ambition is to be an entrepreneur, then you can learn from your bosses, who have already succeeded at what you want to be doing.
As engineers, the market is in our favor at the moment. You don't necessarily need to forfeit equity or ground-floor opportunities for salary and stability.