> your point of view is very, very cynical Yes. It is also informed by a 40-year career that has included a pretty even mix of working for both small and larg

> your point of view is very, very cynical Yes. It is also informed by a 40-year career that has included a pretty even mix of working for both small and large organizations. Cynical != wrong. Here is another cynical but informed observation: part of the modus operandi of large organizations is specifically to prevent any one person from becoming too important to fire. So as soon as someone starts to significantly outperform their peers, the organization actively moves to squash them because an individual contributor at 3 sigma is an existential threat to good order and discipline. This is not speculation. This actually come up many years ago when I was interviewing for a CTO position. I was asked: what would you do if you had an engineer who outperformed everyone on their team by a wide margin, but who everyone disliked. The answer it turned out they were looking for (I learned after the fact): fire them. That's not the answer I gave, and I didn't get the job. I've also tried both strategies (work hard, and slack off) over the years when I've worked at large organizations. I've consistently gotten much better performance reviews when I slacked off. (This is absolutely not true at small companies BTW, which is why I vastly prefer working there.)