MNC vs Startups — My experience
I was one of those happy lads who got into a MNC through my college’s placement cell. It was a struggle though, since I didn’t have eligibility to half of the companies as my scores were low and I was an average student.
Nevertheless, I had to wait for about 6 months after my graduation to get the joining date. I was haunted by the thoughts that whether I would get a Joining date? Am I doing the right thing? The usual ones that you get when you are a fresher and unemployed.
Fortunately, it did turn up and I left my hometown, went to Coimbatore and reported to the company. In the Pre-placement seminar they deliberately said that the training was for “about” 2 months. We were trained in JAVA which I was already pretty familiar with since I had developed few apps in college and few as hobby. We successfully completed 2 months took our assessments and cleared it. We were supposed to be introduced to the Business units so that we can start working on an actual project. But that didn’t happen since we were allegedly told that the business requirements have changed and we were again put into training for next 2 months in SQL. Two months flew by the same process repeated of assessments and results. Now we all were eager to join the Business unit. But guess what? that didn’t happen either. They said “Your batch is a special batch, we see a lot of potential in you. So you’ll be trained for another 2 months” and we were trained in Selenium. But the truth was, they didn’t have any project to allocate us since they had hired in surplus.
By the end of 5th month of training I decided that it was about time to look for other opportunities because I had lost hope since I had already wasted few months, training in things which I was already familiar with.
Through AngelList, I ended up in one of the startup in Bangalore for a better package than the popular MNC by the end of 5th month. I wish I had done this before without wasting about 1 year of my career. Even though I was trained with 2 different languages for about 5 months I never got a chance to work on a live project. Two months after joining the startup in Bangalore, my first project was released to production website which was used by over 40,000 people and trust me, the language which I worked on was RubyOnRails which was a new language for me. That doesn’t mean I was amazing, I did use some help. I’m just trying to highlight the time frame here. I also learnt another new language called React-Native and developed an app for the company from the scratch and released to the users in iOS and Android with over 1,00,000 downloads as of now.
After a year I joined another startup with over 10 million MAU as an app developer. It’s been over a year now in this startup with over 20 million MAU with over 4 million app installs. I have to say, I’ve learnt a lot even in this startup.
My point is, if you are fresher and eager to learn and want to see your work in action, Startups would be your best bet. In an MNC you would be considered as a resource, in a startup you would be considered as an asset. It’s better to be an asset rather than a resource, if you ask me.
