I believe the optimal company size is related to the recency of disruptive technology. At the outset of a novel, disruptive process the scrappy startup jumps ah

I believe the optimal company size is related to the recency of disruptive technology. At the outset of a novel, disruptive process the scrappy startup jumps ahead: the actual advantage comes from not needing to take the same approach and use the same kind of team structure because they're going to leverage the new process. They have to build everything anew, but so does everyone else, so moving on the problem with political solutions in mind can waste most of your resources. Speed, experimentation and risk-taking is favored. This phase can launch a lot of careers, and software has seen it repeatedly, though not as much recently. Startups within the SV model spent most of the past decade mostly working on marketing-heavy concepts with a dash of tech, and I think this is turning just now based on recent hiring threads. When dealing with a mature process the support team is fleshed out and specialized; high performers have been filtered through the events of previous market cycles, and are now optimized into upholding a political role within the org. To a nominal degree everything the mature org does matters more because it's bigger in every respect, but the opportunities presented to ICs deal increasingly with maintaining infrastructure already being used, rather than leveraging infrastructure towards a novel experiment. Someone has to do both, of course, or else you don't get advancements. But you are going to feel more powerful within the big org, and you usually get compensated better.