Quitting A Big Company Is Not The End Of Your Career

It’s more of a beginning, really.

Let me just say it, at least for the benefit of anyone thinking “if I quit the big company…”

I’m sure plenty of people at big companies have moments when they think “I want to quit” or “maybe I should quit.”

But most of them move from one big company to another. The job market runs on that kind of pattern. Those people don’t come to me for advice, and they don’t need it in the first place. If small and medium-sized companies or startups occasionally show up among your options, though, I overwhelmingly recommend “starting” your career.

What is it that starts?

To answer that, let’s first sort out what you think is “ending.”

Take income, for example.

Big companies keep pay quite intentionally flat and steady, partly because of things like membership in the Electrical Workers’ Union and internal and external pressure toward stable compensation. In other words, it sits in a state that’s “hard to raise and hard to lower, at a certain elevated level.” The same goes for the benefits that supplement income.

Giving that up means stepping into a state where the average is unclear and things move up and down easily, or put another way, it means widening the gap between Risk and Reward. Where there’s Risk, there’s naturally an expected Reward. The clearest example is joining a newly launched startup, taking low pay, and receiving founder-level shares or stock options in exchange. You take on the Risk of a lower current salary for the Reward of capital gains. If you spend four or five years at that company, it doesn’t grow at all, your salary never rises, and it never gets acquired or goes public before you leave, you could see that as simply having lost out on salary.

But is it too hasty to call it a pure loss without looking at what you gained in other respects?

So next comes the matter of experience.

If you happen to be young and single, working at a startup or a small company will, without doubt, be an extremely exciting experience. You don’t need to worry too much about income, and the experience of chasing a big opportunity and struggling alongside your comrades will hand you a great many realizations and a sense of fulfillment day to day. Whatever happens to your career afterward, it will surely become tremendous nourishment.

Now, what if you’re already a seasoned veteran with plenty of experience? You know full well what you can handle on your own, and you also know what you can’t do by yourself. If you’ve spent a long time in a certain industry, you also have a rough sense of where you stand within it. But do you really know that? At big companies, a great deal of the work rests on indirect departments. In other words, you’re doing your job on top of a great many black boxes. So isn’t it likely that there’s actually much more you don’t know, more you can’t do, and more you still need to learn?

Big companies also carry a “brand name.” When I was at Yamaha, for instance, people would half-joke that “if you carry a Yamaha business card, nobody will ever turn down a meeting with you,” and at least during my time there, that was undeniably true. Even a cold email or a sudden inquiry was never met with a cold response. That’s the power of a brand name. Startups and small companies don’t have that. If anything, they carry the negative brand name of “being a small company.”

Suppose your specialty is sales. How many times have you gone to sell a completely untrusted product to people in a category where your company’s name means absolutely nothing? Can that really be called genuine experience? Of course, regardless of company size, the underlying techniques and ways of thinking stay the same. So here you can take “an inventory of your experience.” Don’t you want to know how far your career really goes, in truth?

Incidentally, what I wanted to know when I went to America was this: “Everyone keeps saying Silicon Valley is amazing, amazing, but is that really true at the level of individual engineers? How far can I actually go there?”

Finally, an unpleasant topic: the matter of reputation.

Especially with startups, it’s common for the company to collapse within six months or a year and for you to move on again. At that point, you’ll interview for a job somewhere else. This is about the impression you leave in that interview. I’ve conducted a good number of hiring interviews myself, and for candidates with that kind of pattern, the points I watch carefully are: “Was this person actually in a central role within that company?” and “How clearly can they explain the overall picture of the project they were involved in?”

If neither leaves a good impression, I sometimes conclude that this is someone who went to a startup on a whim and ultimately gained nothing from it. Jumping off the stage at Kiyomizu Temple doesn’t make you admirable by itself. It’s only praiseworthy if you actually grasped something through it.

The word “job hopper” is often used negatively, but I actually have a favorable impression of moving from job to job in itself. There’s a lot a person can’t know without trying, so the act of trying various things is, I think, good in itself. But if each individual experience along the way isn’t tied to the next choice or to a long-term career vision, then that’s simply someone who doesn’t stick around. To put it bluntly, that’s a risky hire.

Conversely, the people you think from the bottom of your heart, “alright, let’s entrust this to them!”—in most cases they’re people who picked up something of their own while moving through several jobs. Of course there are also cases where someone with a long career at a single big company gets hired, but in those cases, I think it’s mostly because the company wants some specialized skill, or wants a “predictable person” who can deliver a specific strength in a specific position. So this matter of impression ties back to the same thing as experience: it’s an act of widening the gap between Risk and Reward.

In Silicon Valley, too, there’s a prevailing sense that job hopping is simply normal, so if anything, someone who has stayed at a single company for decades might be treated as the riskier hire. That’s because they’ve never once proven, over the course of their career, that they can succeed at another company.

The biggest thing that starts is a shift in values. Once you’ve stepped outside, you can go wherever you like from there, whether that’s Silicon Valley, Berlin, or Tel Aviv.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/07/546/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.