I don’t have strong feelings about Cringley. He admits in the book he basically wrote an industry gossip mag, so I took the whole thing with a grain of salt and

I don’t have strong feelings about Cringley. He admits in the book he basically wrote an industry gossip mag, so I took the whole thing with a grain of salt and just tried to enjoy it. That said, I think your other comments are correct but somewhat miss the point. Certain types of work you can pretty much only be exposed to within a large company that can muster the required volume of funds / expertise / reputation. And learning to corral diverse groups of people with competing needs and priorities is pretty much the definition of a transferrable skill. One example from my own life: I’ve bounced around financial institutions (mostly banks and credit card companies) for the last several years. To continue building the skills I’m interested in, I need a better understanding of the internals of big banks. It’s simply much more difficult for me to try to learn those things in a small company or startup, unless I can get one of the few spots available in a company like Monzo, which would require me to not only get the position but move away from my friends / family / etc. (And then I’m still looking at a small company’s new vision of how a thing should work rather than seeing how it actually works in most situations today.) There are always tradeoffs, and sometimes a big company will have positions that are better suited to your current goals.