Absolutely, there's one big catch here: the most interesting and difficult work I’ve been involved in What I experienced both at startups and big corporations

Absolutely, there's one big catch here: the most interesting and difficult work I’ve been involved in What I experienced both at startups and big corporations is that it's easy to end up in a path that has neither interesting nor difficult or even useful work. If you're forced to get promoted to get more interesting things to work on I think it forces some really selfish behaviour. Of course it's possible to just move on (I did), but that has other implications. One thing I liked at university was being able to switch teams and projects much more easily without a manager in the way with their own (not the organizations) goals. I ended up working on much more interesting things and experienced better team dynamics, making it much easier to get this balance right.