> As a company scales up, coordinating effort across teams becomes more important for getting stuff done, even as a senior IC. And that is the root of all evil

> As a company scales up, coordinating effort across teams becomes more important for getting stuff done, even as a senior IC. And that is the root of all evil. Everything comes down to a screeching crawl. What could be done in a week by a couple startup folks now takes months or quarters (!). So yes, I don't think "standard of engineering" applies here :-) In addition to all that was already said, this has the disadvantage of misaligning incentives. At FAANG (or any other big co for that matter), it pays to stretch projects and blow their complexity outside of any reasonable measure, just because the folks in charge of such projects benefit materially from more people and "bigger architecture". It is engineering bureaucracy at its worst, unfortunately. In contrast, at startups it pays to move fast and one simply cannot afford growing unnecessary "fat", gotta stay lean or die. Obviously, some folks are more comfortable with the former (FAANG/big co) approach, because at the end of the day they just want to get their paycheck and go home, it's not about this job or that job at all. It's a tradeoff, for sure.