I agree this is a great way to think about it. At the end of the day “business impact” per employee is the thing that matters most to your individualized risk.

I agree this is a great way to think about it. At the end of the day “business impact” per employee is the thing that matters most to your individualized risk. If your expertise is essential to the continued improvement of the company’s core business model, you have nothing to fear. It’s super important to note that business impact is not even close to uniformly distributed throughout a company, even though we sometimes like to pretend that it is. This is all to make a subtle refinement of your point, that it’s worthwhile to join teams that are high value per engineer, even if the company is more bloated. (Ad serving infra at Google, ec2 at AWS, payments processing at Uber). However, because those teams are so essential, they tend to have low turnover, higher bars for entry, and a higher than usual rate of internal transfers (as high performers from less essential teams are shifted into more critical roles). So you’re less likely to be placed into those teams from the outside, unless you have a history of working for those kinds of teams.