Why do software engineers choose to work at startups?

In today’s job market, it’s good to be an engineer. Very good, in fact. LinkedIn data shows that software engineering job starts have essentially doubled in the last two years, moving from under 10 percent of the U.S. job market to roughly 20 percent.

While tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google may seem like obvious destinations for these highly coveted workers, don't count out startups.

Among the LinkedIn Top Startups in the U.S. — an annual ranking of the hottest young companies to work for — engineering was a top-three job function at 38 of the 50 organizations that made the list. It makes sense: Today, companies of all sizes and tech orientations need software, and they need employees who know how to build those programs. 

But if you're an engineer in the open job market, why would you choose a startup when you could join an established company?

I spoke to over a dozen current and former software engineers from some of the 2019 Top Startups to find out what drew them to where they are working today. Here’s what they had to say: 

Sometimes, choosing where you want to work simply comes down to what you actually want to work on. 

"Apple is just not interesting to me as a product," said German Frigerio, a staff engineer at education startup Coursera. Frigerio also wasn’t all that into Google — a company he was "in the pipeline" with before Coursera — because the search giant wasn't going to give him a say in what tech he would be assigned to if hired.

Engineering veteran Alice Wang, now field CTO at cloud data warehouse Snowflake, has spent her fair share of time at Silicon Valley legacy brands like Oracle and Sun Microsystem. She told me she chose her current startup role "first and foremost" because of the technology she'd be supporting.

"I always look at a company and the technology that they that they bring to market, because ultimately the technology has to interest me," she said.

Lakshya Goel, another engineer at Snowflake, said his current company's more appealing "tech stack" swayed him in and away from taking a role at a "non-startup" he was considering.

"I looked at the Stack Overflow developer survey ... The technologies I would have been using at the non-startup company were not in good standing with the developer community," he explained. "It was one of the biggest factors influencing my decision."

At your average tech behemoth, it's not uncommon for an engineer to get the feeling that they're just "a cog in a machine," Santiago Gallego, a software engineer intern at Coursera told me. After two internships with Google, he decided to head to the education startup.

"I was essentially looking for somewhere where I felt like I was having a bigger impact and really doing important work for the company," said Gallego.

Other, more seasoned engineers I spoke with echoed Gallego’s sentiment.

Domenico Matteo, a former senior software engineer at Coinbase, recently left the cryptocurrency startup for Cobalt Robotics, an even smaller outfit. "The main reason that drove me here is the increased autonomy and impact on the product that I have now," he said.

And for Steffen Enni, director of engineering at cloud-based freight logistics unicorn Flexport, the ability to personally enact change at small companies has sent him to startups over and over again.