Recently, I have moved to Toronto and started exploring career opportunities here. My first impressions about .net developer/architect career are really controversial.

Here options that comes to my mind right now:

• Grow as a developer, lead and solution architect in large and well-known company, like Logitech or IBM.
• Doing .net development medium size (10-30) software shops
• Joining some start-up guys

First one, seems very bureaucratic with kills all programming fun, that is such valuable to me.

And there is not a lot of start ups, that are based on MS technology stack.

Good mid-size company seems like a best fit to me, since I can have a lot of fun, doing new projects.

Previously I have been working at large (5000+) outsourcing provider as a .Net developer. I was kind of a 'vanilla' time, because our team were always doing massive scale projects from scratch, on latest .Net stack.

I would really appreciate if you share pros and cons of path, that you have chosen and what you value most in your current project.

I'll start:

Pros for Mid-size

• You are really close to business and application consumers, without all bureaucratic papers

Cons

• It seems, that career oportunities of vertical growth is rather limited, once I have to switch to my own company or join development team of some big players.