VP level jobs at Google have nothing to do with being a developer and everything to do with playing office politics extremely effectively (and getting lucky, as with much else in life).
I am very wary about claims like those from the article about how working for a lower salary at startups will allow you to somehow compress N years of career experience into (N-k) years of actual work.
I think the instances where that actually happens are balanced out by the instances where your work will be valued at less than what it'd be worth had you worked at Google.
> I am very wary about claims like those from the article about how working for a lower salary at startups will allow you to somehow compress N years of career experience into (N-k) years of actual work.
That claim has never made any sense to me (I think I first saw pg make it). In my experience, there's little to no practical difference between working as a developer at most startups and doing the same at a bigcorp in terms of experience. There's certainly a lot of rah-rah-rah about the "startup culture", but places like Google try very hard to make their employees happy as well.
There might be a little more cowboy coding at the startup and a little more bureaucracy at the bigcorp (though it's a good manager's job to shield engineers from that bureaucracy), but your future job prospects are almost always better when you've got a bigcorp stint on your resume.
