Both Big Tech and small

30th March 2025

I have experience with both, and from my experience, it's best to have both. At a smaller company, I enjoyed the speed of shipping features. The engineering pace. It wasn't git push straight to prod, but it was not far off.

At Big Tech, the engineering quality is much greater. There isn't really a tradeoff with speed for quality as there is at smaller companies. The company will probably exist for the next millennium, so we choose quality almost every time. Behind the curtain, there are many PR reviews, build & test pipelines, deployment rollout & rollback plans, and observability & tracing before code gets to prod.

Both provide insightful perspectives on the tradeoffs in software engineering, and I think SWEs ideally should experience both.