I see it in my current employer vs my previous employer. While not a small startup by any means, I notice a clear attempt by many ranks to encourage working late and working from home, be it "we'll order pizzas for people that stay here until 20:00" to "we have crazy deadlines that we must!!!! finish now!!!!" nonsense to "we encourage open source but we don't give enough time to developers to handle community issues, and we implicitly expect them to do that on their own time at night or during the weekend". To me, this is very toxic for junior developers who cannot, or do not even know they should, resist it. None of that was there on my previous, enterprise job. Come to work at some hour, do what you do, go home. I try to push this "work from home during after hours" mentality as much as possible, but it's very entrenched.
Regarding sear fillers, while true to some respect for enterprise, I'd say from many conversations I've had with people in the start up world, there exist many fillers there as well, often including founders and other "C"-level executives who only had the talent and know-how to give themselves a fancy title.
Finally, this was posted here in another discussion, but I think it's interesting here as well: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
I wouldn't trade my enterprise experience for anything. It gave me a deep appreciation for the craft of software development, and an amazing introduction to complex, well-designed systems (not to mention some terrible ones as well). Without that opportunity to learn process and best practices, I would never have been successful elsewhere in my career.
Of course, you'll always find seat-fillers at big companies, but I think that'd be true no matter where you go. Bad hiring decisions are real, but should not discount or destroy the many great people who grow up in enterprise environments and can make meaningful contributions.
With all due respect to the "move fast, break things" evident in many startups, it leaves behind a big technical mess for the people who help transition the company out of startup phases. I'd bet most would do well to incorporate a few more stodgy enterprise devs earlier in the process to help steer the software toward a sustainable path.
I agree to a point, and tried to address it above. It's a tradeoff -- do it right now for a big payoff later. However, you have to survive to the payoff. So maybe you spend a bunch of time doing it right, and then die when you haven't actually sold anything yet.
I'd rather have a company that made it to the "we have to clean up our technical debt" phase then building something beautiful that never sees the light of day.
There's a balance to be had, though. I've said it downthread but I'll only mention it again here because it's relevant - I'm a manager in the "enterprise" (or more accurately, I'm a bit more senior than that, but whatever). My perspective doesn't really fall to either extreme:
Coming out of the gate and addressing the unknown (to keep it reasonably similar to startups), I want to move fast, iterate, fail fast and other cliches. Eventually, though, if we're as smart as we think we are, the unknown shrinks within the scope of the problem we're trying to solve and we move to a more manageable pace - with process, standards and all of that. I don't see burn and churn as a long term strategy for my products or my people.
Say what you will about enterprise, but we can't be total idiots. There is complexity in what we do - many are managing projects or programs that would essentially be a startup's entire product. For every unicorn, there are likely thousands of startups that will not grow as large as a single enterprise product. (talking generally here)
I'm not saying we're better or anything, but I'd hope that an enterprise dev's resume doesn't go into the shredder just because they spent years at a large company. Consider that they're probably getting paid pretty well, probably get stock (or at least the discount on purchase of stock) that is already publicly traded and liquid, weeks of paid time off, all sorts of benefits and little concern about job loss due to insolvency. If an enterprise dev is telling a startup they want to work there, it's very likely that they believe in the product or simply want to work at the faster pace, and they'll have as much to teach you as you have to teach them.
/soapbox :D
As an example, a dev with say 4 years of experience overall that happens to be working at a bank who might have had some solid internship and side projects upon graduation won't be 'locked out' to the same degree as someone with 15 years at that same bank. Someone with 25 years at that bank who worked on very similar projects may be seen as unemployable by most startups.
That junior dev might not have any kind of preference or necessity for process, but just wound up at the bank after graduation. It's these devs that probably suffer.
The person who stayed 25 years (ageism aside) probably did so for a reason, and some will assume that the reason was process and predictability in their work. Someone that stayed for that long and didn't get bored is probably going to be passed over by most startups.
Then again, you hit it with the other point. I'm much more likely to found my own startup than work at someone else's, but a sufficiently disruptive fintech/insurtech/analytics play would totally have my attention. I think the bigger issue is that the right role for me would be something a founder would likely fill, so I'm probably more likely to talk about co-founding something than being an early employee.
Well shit, I'm old!
The other factor is that enterprise programmers tend to prefer places with a lot of process in place. They want to see a well defined pipeline with tests and approvals and gates and so on. Pushing untested code to production isn't even in their mental space, but sometimes you just gotta do it at a startup when you got a press hit and your traffic just doubled. Basically, they tend to slow things down by demanding doing things right.
Now, for the first problem, that's just wrong -- just because you were in an enterprise doesn't mean you are bad or you are willing to deal with bad people. It's just a cognitive bias.
For the second problem, those people are right, there should be good process and it will be better in the long term. But in the short term it feels like they are slowing things down, because startups generally don't have the luxury of investing more time now for a bigger payoff later, or at least they don't think they do.