As someone who has been in and out of small companies it is usually for a number of reasons: 1) I feel like I can effect more change with fewer barriers in a s

As someone who has been in and out of small companies it is usually for a number of reasons: 1) I feel like I can effect more change with fewer barriers in a smaller company - the idea to goal conversion is much more condensed vs when I worked at IBM and the number of processes and approvals it had to go through. 2) If you are in small companies there is usually very little room for progression, smaller companies = smaller budgets - when I was an employee of these the only real way to get any kind of pay increase as experience increases was to switch companies. 3) Some of us enjoy the change, I loved the work I did at IBM but it was still mostly BAU work, there was very little scope for personal innovation over the long term. Sure you could switch departments quite easily and that was a huge benefit but back to point 1 - the innovation momentum is hard to keep up. At the companies I have been working at for the past 7 years, every day is different, every day is researching the next best thing or how to improve the current things we have with a view to squeezing out more performance, or decreasing costs. Sure I have some BAU work but it's mostly meetings and developer mentoring, hardly painful! 4) To your final point, I am lucky to be doing something I have always been passionate about - this isnt a rat race for me, its not about keeping up with others, my definition of success is how much I enjoy going to work in the morning and not having to fret the little things.