Thinking about switching jobs...

Do you prefer working in a smaller startup sized company, a bigger more settled one, or as a consultant?

I would love to work for an Employer who will pay me well for creating "Not a Hotdog" style apps

As long as the pay is good, and the PM does jerk the dev team around with nonsense changes - then all good.

They all have unique pros and cons, it depends on your style.

What are your personal goals and preferences?

@gosubinit Nice tight team and a varied workload

@ScriptCoded Think of goals that you can achieve without depending on others and answer again ;)

What things do you want to be doing in the future? How do you want to participate in the business' success?

There’s also going corporate, so to speak. I think of corporate as big, old, established institutions like banks or universities. They’re all completely different environments within corporate. You’d have to suss out if the dev environment is what you’d like. And decide if corporate evil is paying you enough.

hourly consultant, no string attached

@respex And no safety?

@ScriptCoded if safety is a important part of your personal goals, looks like consultancy is excluded.

@ScriptCoded What is safety?

@gosubinit Perhaps that differs between countries, but where I live it's not too unusual to have a salary even when you don't have a project

I worked in a small company until now.

It's really nice if you want to learn an awful lot of tech stacks, but if you want to improve the stacks you already know keep away from that.

Money-wise: go to a startup company and get equity, it might be a bet, but if it goes well, you're settled for life

@respex they mean safety like you will get a reliable paycheck. Your pay is safe at a company (to a degree) and very much not safe as a consultant, you never know when you’ll hit a dry spell

For most devs I don't think it matters if you're employed in a large or small company. A small company might have a team of 5 devs as the entire thing. The large company has 100 devs you'd probably still work in a team of 5 devs for your specific project. So your day to day might not feel all that different. Beyond that there's pros and cons to each but if you're used to one thing you'd be able to feel comfortable there.

Being a consultant is different. Allthough can't say anything about it as it varies SO much between jobs. I've been a consultant for one project for years where we were treated no different from employees. And another project where we were "in and out" in weeks. I guess the only thing I CAN say about being a consultant is there's POTENTIAL for huge variation.

Personally I started as a consultant and enjoyed switching projects often.
I felt the variation gave me a wider perspective which was very useful at the beginning of my career .
Then I moved on to staying longer at each project and enjoyed the feeling that I made a long term difference.

But whenever I switched back to a short term project again I felt like that was fun too.

And now I've become an employee working on the same product for ages.

and I enjoy all 3 variants. So wouldn't think too much about it.