In my career, I've had almost the opposite experience. At $bigco, it was possible to beg/borrow for 100k to solve some problem, or hack together some tooling t

In my career, I've had almost the opposite experience. At $bigco, it was possible to beg/borrow for 100k to solve some problem, or hack together some tooling to solve a problem the team was running into. Need some servers and licenses, and it's near year end, partner with a program manager who hasn't used all his budget, help solve their problems, and get things done. I ended up spending something like $250k before the VP was even aware of the side project, and when it got to the VP level, it was how do we spend more to fix the gaps and have proper resources so it's not some toy side project. It was that way anyways, up until $bigco decided to emulate the way it thought the FAANG companies worked, and the management their started trying to micro-manage everyone in a large culture shift. At mid-size growth company, getting things done was still available, but you sort of had to tiptoe around decisions or solutions Co-Founder/CTO or employee number 10 had a personal interest in or battle it out on particularly poor tech decisions. Most progress was made in areas that the team didn't have an interest or expertise in (IE security), but it was ultimately possible to make progress. And in startup life, probably the least autonomy of all. The engineering manual literally says you only should work on what you've been assigned, as doing anything else creates chaos. Implying, you don't want to be a chaos maker in the eyes of your employer do you? So it's more difficult than anywhere else I've worked to tiptoe around these emotional investments, have any level of autonomy, and move the product forward. Anyways, I think my overall message is, companies are far too varied to have any idea on what to expect from moving from startup to $bigco. There might be some general trends, but the environment varies so much, you're not guaranteed to see any general trends when making the switch. All that can really be said, is it will be different, and you may have to jump a few times to really see any of the generalizations apply to you. Note: Using throwaway account to avoid any blowback.