This article...exaggerates...the difference between SV and 'not SV' companies. A lot, actually. I've worked at a few places in SV, and several outside of SV, to

This article...exaggerates...the difference between SV and 'not SV' companies. A lot, actually. I've worked at a few places in SV, and several outside of SV, too. For the most part it's similar: use the existing infrastructure and implement a service, front-end, whatever, within that, to solve a business need. Very little in the way of novel or new solutions to genuinely new problems is required. The difference is mainly in pay and, to a much lesser degree, respect. Regarding autonomy--usually a high degree of autonomy is found in two places: 1) at larger companies, a very senior, trusted individual who has proven himself to be competent and capable of making big decisions; 2) at startups, a very junior individual scratching an itch and loading up on technical debt. For the most part solutions are prescribed or narrowly constrained--99.999% of engineers are going to use the same services architecture, libraries, and compute infra every other engineer is using. Regarding curiosity and problem solving: I guess I have a different definition of "curiosity" and "problem solving." What I've seen in this industry ain't either, generally: it's mainly driven by personalities at the individual or corporate level, e.g., "everyone" doing what Google does or following Fowler, and empirically unsupported anecdotes/fads (e.g. TDD, agile, etc.). The vast majority of engineering work in any established company is to use an existing tool or infra to implement a generally well-defined need. Most of the interesting details are already solved, and the implementation work, while also interesting, isn't really solving the problem, per se.