I left BigCo that was not in the bay or tech and am at small_co (<500 people). I think its just a matter of the size of company and make-up of engineering org.

I left BigCo that was not in the bay or tech and am at small_co (<500 people). I think its just a matter of the size of company and make-up of engineering org. If work is broken out to specialized teams (SSL certs, scans, security stuff - team A, VM's and storage - team B, networking/firewalls - team C, etc.) there will be friction, doesn't matter if its some cool company or some boring Fortune 500 company making farm equip. You should be able to figure out the scale of friction with interview questions like "say a new project spins up to build a web+mobile app/CRUD/SQL and needs servers - walk me through how many teams+time it takes to get servers up and running where a dev can deploy code"