What's the company? That sounds like a great arrangement.

I find that both startups and big companies usually fail (not maliciously, but just due to failures of introspection) to deliver on their non-monetary promises.

Startups: people associate startups with interesting, creative work reflexively. Not so, or not always. First, 80% of startups aren't doing very interesting things (social semantic coupon aggregators? That's the business plan analogue of OOP's VisitorFactoryObserverFactory pattern!) Even in those other 20%, there's a lot of uninteresting stuff that has to be done in order to meet the rapid client-acquisition or growth targets.

Related to this, every startup has deadlines, and that can be managed so it doesn't become a problem, but too-often startups develop Deadline Culture and accumulate technical debt at a rapid pace. (It doesn't take long.) One of those unpublished startup negativities is how quickly and how often this happens. It's not published because, by the time Deadline Culture is having serious negative impacts (in code quality, organizational structure, morale and blame-shifting when things break) the people being affected have double- and triple-digit employee numbers (i.e. they're nobodies).

With big companies, the promise is that you can have a career within the company that transcends "jobs". That is, if one job doesn't work out, you can move to another one and still have a 12-year career (possibly moving into another role entirely) with the company. In theory.

What happens in practice in BigCos is that manager-as-SPOF is still the law of the land. Large-corporate middle managers often have zero interest in extra-hierarchical collaboration, some actively want to isolate their reports, and are just as liable to take employee's extracurricular interests (or outright desire for transition) personally as startup founders. The problem with the middle managers' emotional outbursts related to people wanting to "leave them" is that they have a lot more power (within their organizations) than "jilted" founders.

What I find darkly ironic is how many rapid-growth startups-- mostly managers, engineers aren't this way-- want to become huge corporations (and naively think they won't lose their character in the process). I find that hypocritical. "We're agile and awesome because we're a small startup. We also want to become bigger than Google." What people can't say (because it's impolite) is that they won't care that the thing became a BigCo because they'll be very rich by then-- or at least, rich enough to easily move on. It's a less brazen variant of "build to flip".

People tend to fetishize 200%/year growth curves and billion-dollar exits, while ignoring the fact that anything growing that fast is going to get destroyed in the process. Fuck 200%. If my income grows at a "piddling" 10%/year for the next 40, that will give me more money than I could ever need at any stage of life (and more than I could ever deserve toward the end). So I'd rather focus on building real skills and learning how to actually reliably deliver value to the world than chasing some huge acquisition.

Out of curiosity, what technologies do you use at your company? I've become a major fan of Scala of late, but I'm also impressed by Clojure and Ocaml.