IT as Career 4 - First Company

The next in my series on IT as Career - 1, 2, 3

So you made the choice and now having studied hard, looking to get your first job.

A big question at this stage is,  Whether it is good to join a big IT company (Infy, Wipro etc) or a small 10 people IT shop? It is always debatable. In the big IT shops you get to learn a lot on how big projects work, about quality and processes, how to do work in a methodical fashion etc. But in the small shop is where your contribution will stand out. Your code could make or break the whole company. This of course means, more pressure, longer work hours and mostly lesser pay. But then it is an experience that is very difficult to come by in the bigger firms. So my recommendation is to work in a small-medium sized company for starters and then move on to the bigger ones later in your career.

So learn the to handle stress and see the hard life in the smaller company, so that when you do move to a bigger company you are a mature person and then you can learn all about processes and how a mature business works.

But seeing the tremendous growth in IT outsourcing and the way most of the deals are stuck based on the size of the vendor, I doubt if those small IT companies (that depend on pure cost advantage, without any specific niche area) will survive very long. But take advantage of those when they are still there.