Impact at Startups vs. Big Tech
This is part of a series on differences in working for startups vs. big tech companies in which I’m exploring various aspects of work that vary between them, to help aspiring job seekers make more informed decisions about where they want to work. This is mainly from the point of view of a software engineer, however some parts will apply to broader tech jobs. You may also be interested in my previous article on flexibility in startups vs. big tech.
Introduction
Impact has become quite a popular buzzword in business. Most people want to feel like what they are doing matters, and most employers want the work of their employees to benefit the business. This combination of senses has become embedded in one pithy buzzword. There are many issues with using a simple term for a complex concept (such as much “impact” being either subjective or difficult to measure). However I’m not going to go into that here. Instead I want to explore the ways in which having impact varies across types of companies.
Local Impact
I define “local impact” as any impact you have in your company (or some other specific context). The absolute benefit (however we measure it) doesn’t matter for local impact, only how it affects the local context in which you are working. To give a non-tech example, your moves in a chess game matter quite a bit to the outcome of the game, but they don’t really affect the world at large past that.
For a more realistic example, say you join a new project to build some software. They are having a lot of issues with runtime performance. After some investigation and experimentation, you are able to come up with a set of changes that cut runtime down by 50%. This would be a significant amount of local impact. Note that in particular we don’t know what the absolute impact of this change is, because I haven’t told you how important this software is at all. It could be that it’s used by millions of people daily and this change will save each of them hours of time. Or it could be that only three people use it and they don’t actually care much about how long it takes. Or, as is most likely, somewhere in between.
Startups are a great place to have local impact. Everything is new and probably barely functional. That means there is a lot of room for improvement and a lot of “low hanging fruit”. You can make huge effects on the business with a relatively small amount of work. In many cases there might be a complete lack of some critical product feature or piece of infrastructure that changes the whole trajectory of the company. You might do some work like set up CI/testing when there was none before, or build an entire new missing feature for your app.
Conversely, at a big company it’s quite hard to have a lot of local impact. The company is large and has probably set up everything to work decently well. Any change you make may not be very noticeable compared to how things worked before. You might have a project like “tweak model parameters to improve search results ranking by +1%” or “add a small feature to the app to better handle some edge cases”.
Absolute Impact
I define “absolute impact” as the impact you have on the entire world, in terms of actually affecting people’s lives. This is probably what most people think of as impact when hearing that word. The key thing to note is that a large local impact may result in a small absolute impact (or vice versa). For a non-tech example consider when the Federal Reserve decides to adjust interest rates (or not). This has far-reaching effects on the economy even though the actual action is a rather minimal adjustment to a stable system.
At a big company you will find it a lot easier to have absolute impact. Because there are probably millions of users/customers, any change can affect all of those people. Even if you do something simple like improve accessibility of a button on your web app, you might be improving the lives of thousands of people. Something like improving performance by 1% could save a total of days of time across everyone, even though in terms of local impact it’s quite trivial.
Conversely, at a startup it can be difficult to have absolute impact. Since you don’t have as many users/customers (you might not even have any), only truly massive changes matter. If you add a big new feature, but it happens that only 5% of people care, that’s potentially not a good use of your time, even if it had a big local impact. It might also be that the biggest absolute impact doesn’t lie in engineering work, but rather in things like sales, marketing, and customer support. That can feel frustrating if you are an engineer that wants to have a high amount of absolute impact via your engineering work.
Which to Choose?
I can’t tell you which type of impact is more important. I have noticed, however, that most people seem to gravitate towards one or the other. If you are the kind of person that wants to feel like what you are doing matters to the entire world even though the individual things you are doing feel like they are small adjustments to a bigger system, then a big company might be more appropriate. Conversely, if you want to build newer things from scratch and fill in huge missing gaps, even if ultimately no one really cares, then a startup might be a better fit. Perhaps you are looking for both? In that case a startup that’s already pretty far along to have many users, but not too far to have everything settled might be optimal.
And, of course, everything above is a generalization. There will be cases in which you have more local impact at a large company (they do, occasionally, build new things, after all) or more global impact at a startup (some startups are widely used despite being very small). Always consider the specifics of the companies you are thinking about when deciding on which job to take.