Best of times, worst of times (Re: I'm not surprised)
I've worked in four startups (the biggest one was well on the way when I joined, with several hundred employees; the smallest had ~20). IME, in the wise words of Ali G, "there is a high, but there is also a low". When it works well, it's better than any employment experience I've ever had; working with really clever, knowledgeable people with a genuinely inspiring attitude, where stuff you'd expect to take a week (or months, in a big corporate enterprise environment) were done and dusted in a day or two. Oh, and the boss used to tell me off and order me to go home when he spotted me still working past 6pm.... and they PAID OVERTIME. (Imagine that!)
OTOH... when it's bad, it's horrid. A toxic manager or coworker, for instance, can (in general, in the UK anyway) make your life much more miserable in a small firm than a big organisation. On top of that you've much less job security: of those four, one went bust owing us two months' pay, holiday and severance, at three hours notice; another was acquired by a horrible US megacorp (cue everyone around me whooping and cheering because when the mail announcement arrived, they all realised they'd cleared their mortgages - sadly I arrived 6m too late to get stock); and the other two made me redundant when they had a few bad quarters (read: less explosive growth than the made-up charts in the business plan had predicted.)
A pint either to celebrate paying off your mortgage or drown your sorrows from missing out.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
