I think something this article misses is that it is much easier to get good information on all these things for the relatively small number of big companies than it is for the enormous number of start ups. Related to that, information you can get about start ups is much more likely to be obsoleted sometime within the duration of your employment.
To make this concrete, if you care about work / life balance, you can independently research the reputations of different big companies on that front. But for an arbitrary start up, the best you can do is often to ask them and hope you can suss out the degree of truth in their answer. Then if you do find a start up that really has good balance, it is (by definition) going to grow quickly, which often (but not always) results in that balance changing over time. Things change less quickly at big companies.
This isn't an argument in favor of either big companies or start ups, it's just an argument against the idea that "big company vs. start up does not add any information once you know what you care about"; I think it does.
To make this concrete, if you care about work / life balance, you can independently research the reputations of different big companies on that front. But for an arbitrary start up, the best you can do is often to ask them and hope you can suss out the degree of truth in their answer. Then if you do find a start up that really has good balance, it is (by definition) going to grow quickly, which often (but not always) results in that balance changing over time. Things change less quickly at big companies.
This isn't an argument in favor of either big companies or start ups, it's just an argument against the idea that "big company vs. start up does not add any information once you know what you care about"; I think it does.