Tooling is better at large corps, they will teach you how to build things at scale. Autonomy is greater at startups, they will teach you to do everything yourse

Tooling is better at large corps, they will teach you how to build things at scale. Autonomy is greater at startups, they will teach you to do everything yourself. At a large corp, if you don't like the tooling, it sucks because changing it is akin to pushing against a mountain (doable but you will burn an insane amount of time and value doing so). At a startup, there's the instability and the nagging feeling that what you cobbled together could have been done better "if you just had more time." It's a tradeoff between autonomy and institutionalization, and that really comes down to personal choice. Some of the best roles are where you can exercise your autonomy in a large organization (within bounds).