Why new developers should work at a small startup

In my first year of working in the industry (6 months as an intern, 6 months as a full-time employee), I worked at startups that were less than 10 people large. I was one of the only 2 or 3 developers, and usually one of the first. Throughout the year I spent working at startups, I learned a lot, and I failed a lot. Most importantly, I experienced amazing growth in my career and my technical abilities. Here are some of the biggest benefits of working at a startup:

Ownership

Being one of the few people on the development team, I was always able to make a pretty big impact on the code base. In one of my jobs, I created the front-end of the app almost entirely by myself. In another, I re-wrote the entire front-end of the app.

I was able to take this level of ownership as a new developer because, quite simply, there was no one else to do it. Through ownership of the code base, I learned a lot of important lessons very quickly. If I wrote a method longer than 10 lines or had Components (I was using React at my previous position) that were longer than 100 lines, I knew that I had to comment on everything. If I looked at the code next month, it would be time-consuming to remember what I did and why. I wrote thorough documentation regarding certain decisions we made — whether it was for refactoring code…