From personal experience, the bigger (or more structured) the company, the more likely it is that you will be actively discouraged from straying too far from yo

From personal experience, the bigger (or more structured) the company, the more likely it is that you will be actively discouraged from straying too far from your assigned bit of work, either by doing it differently, or taking on a tangential problem in the codebase. This essentially kills, over time, any desire or ability to 'make a problem your own', and you run the risk of becoming just another code monkey.