Services Company and Product Company

Had this interesting discussion with my friend on the differences of career graph in a big IT ‘product company’ or an IT ‘services company’.

The gist of it was that a career at ‘Services company’ is first ‘Generalization’ and later ‘Specialization’ and in a product company it is ‘Specialization’ and then later ‘Generalization’.

In a services company the first few(5-7yrs) years one is allowed to explore various areas in and then later he is encourage to take to a particular field of specialization. In the beginning of the career, the person could get exposed to do client interaction and be at the forefront and enrich his experience.

In a product company for the first few years one is allowed to work on different products that company has but thing is that it is only backend work. After a person is there in a product company for sufficient amount of time and he reaches quite senior position like being a director or a VP then only he gets to do a front end work of client interaction.
These equations get changed if we were to take small companies or startups into picture. One fundamental fact that changes is that the graph here could move in a total non linear fashion as to opposed to a linear graph in a big company.