‘Have you worked at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, [0], etc.?’, they ask. ‘Nope’, I reply. ‘Hmmmmm’, they murmur with a clear irony.

I don’t want to sound apologetic, but sometimes people want to make you feel inferior based on some arbitrary criteria they find valuable and important. Is the experience working at a big tech company valuable? Absolutely. Is it one of the most important signals to measure one’s qualification? I doubt.

For some reason, I’ve always been drawn to startups where you can be much more than a small inconsequential piece in a big mechanism. A square peg whose diameter is smaller than that of the round hole [1]. It’s amazing how much value people are investing in credentials, brands and the affiliation to some successful and prestigious institutions (be it Google, be it Y Combinator, be it Princeton).

Quite often it’s better not to fight the social values, but embrace them. It’s worth testing your skills against the best at the interviews and applications when everyone else is running around occupied by them (career fairs, college/grad school and job applications). This way even if you end up not accepting a big company’s offer, you won’t feel that you’re missing out and all the runners around you won’t be able to show/feel their superiority.

These days when I think about it, the regret minimization framework suggests that I should try myself at big prestigious companies as a learning experience or possibly even the catalyst for my career. That’s surprising when coming from a startup guy. Am I fulfilling someone’s agenda for my life instead of listening to my inner voice?

Notes
[0] Fill in your favorite tech giant here.
[1] Invalidating the famous idiom.

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