> Is this a big company thing? Yes, kind of. There seems to be one universal quality that defines both developer productivity and quality of output: ownership

> Is this a big company thing? Yes, kind of. There seems to be one universal quality that defines both developer productivity and quality of output: ownership. When developers have no ownership, no liabilities, and no penalties they are free to largely turn their brains off. Yes, they have to do some work but there is no pressure to do more than just survive and no motivation. Large employers prefer this for reasons of candidate identification, zero cost retention, and employee predictability. From a psychological perspective the target is low openness but moderately high intelligence. The output is people who are really fucking boring and cowardly. Yes, the openness metric of OCEAN accounts for about 80% of cowardice and bravery which is the flip side of creativity. In my experience startups aren’t much different. Management moves faster and pivots more frequently which results in churn that keeps developers more busy, which is not the same thing as high productivity.