Comment by TuringNYC
>> blow-out small-to-medium company
This is surprisingly more difficult than it seems. You could go by VC fame, but even those have only a 10-20% hit rate, with a decent chance you end up at Juicely or whatever.
You could go by VC dollars raised, but that often sets you up for sales-driven companies rather than true engineering-rich cultures.
You could go for obvious stand-out products (OpenAI, Claused) but you notice there arent that many positions except in rare cases.
Am I over-simplifying this?
Yes, making sound choice is hard, just as our life often hinges on a handful of choices. That said, a coworker of mine mentioned an algorithm that seemed to work: first you pick a company that solves a problem that fascinates you and that has people are you willing to work with. You can check LinkedIn for the employe profiles, and you can rely on friend recommendations. The bottomline is, you minimize your chance of regret when it comes to choosing a company. If the company folds, at least you get to work with interesting people, build friendship, learn something new, and work on something fun and meaningful. The second second step is to rely on math. Give the company a time box, say 2 years. If the company does not have satisfying momentum in two years, then jump ship. Note it's about growth and momentum, however you define it. Everything else is secondary consideration. In 10 years, you will have 5 times. Now, the chance that you will succeed at least once 1 - P^6, where P is the failure rate of the companies. Even if the failure rate is 30%, you success rate will be 99.76%, an almost guaranteed success. And now, if you always join a top-tier company in the corresponding sector, your chance of success will even be higher. There are two catches, though. First, you need to be able to switch job whenever you want, so leetcode hard and study hard in your focused domain of experience. Second, 2 years of experience hardly can be enough for progressing your level of expertise, so you will have to work like hell to make 2 years of experience worth four years, instead of having one month of experience repeating 24 times.