Comment by justapassenger

> The two things I really like about working for smaller places or starting a company is you get very direct access to users and customers and their problems, which means you can actually have empathy for what's actually going on with them, and then you can directly solve it. That cycle is so powerful, the sooner you learn how to make that cycle happen in your career, the better off you'll be.

I think that author is confusing ability to get access vs being forced to do it.

At big company, there's so many other things and layers, that you can easily spend your whole career without touching anything related to users. But, you can also just work on directly customer facing parts - that gives you direct access to customer problems. Just be careful - there's more problems that you can imagine, the bigger the company and customer base.