I mostly agree, though I would add: spending a couple years at Google is not necessarily going to be super helpful for starting a project independently. There’s a pretty big difference between being good at using Google tooling and making incremental improvements on existing software versus building something end-to-end and from scratch. That’s not to say it’s useless, but if someone’s medium-term goal is doing web development for EA orgs, I would push working at a small high-quality startup. Of course, the difficulty is that those are harder to identify.
I mostly agree, though I would add: spending a couple years at Google is not necessarily going to be super helpful for starting a project independently. There’s a pretty big difference between being good at using Google tooling and making incremental improvements on existing software versus building something end-to-end and from scratch. That’s not to say it’s useless, but if someone’s medium-term goal is doing web development for EA orgs, I would push working at a small high-quality startup. Of course, the difficulty is that those are harder to identify.