> I've mostly worked for startup to mid sized companies in the past

I saw an anecdote a few years ago about a hiring manager basically saying, "If you worked happily for a small startup, you will most likely be unable to put up with the bureaucracy of a large enterprise from now on"

I've often wondered how much truth there was to that statement.

The bureaucracy sucks, but I think I could deal with that. The biggest buzzkill for me is working on such minuscule parts of enormous systems. In software, the results of your work are already pretty abstract, but working for a huge company, it's on another level, and I just can't find any motivation in it. It's never interested me, and I'm not sure why I thought it would for the right price.

> The biggest buzzkill for me is working on such minuscule parts of enormous systems

I think that was also part of whatever I saw had to say. But I don't remember where I read such a thing, so who knows.

Personally I have found it to be quite accurate. The smaller the company you work for the likelihood of 'flexibility' in your role increases. Those companies just don't have the headcount to have a full suite of engineers so rely on people dipping their toes in other tasks to keep the machine ticking along (e.g. frontend devs handling deployment).

With a larger company you will typically find they have already hired specialists to handle very specific tasks. You can always do some things but more often than not the rigor of corporate structure says "If you need anything done in dev ops, please speak to _Bob_ and he will sort it out".

Jumping from the challenge of constantly adapting to different tasks to being there to only do a single 'role' can be quite jarring.

This is something that has made me a bit nervous to switch jobs. I don't live on the coasts, so prospects are already a bit more limited. I've spent the past decade more or less on a team of ~5 engineers as part of a ~10 person company.

I did interview at a different startup a couple years ago, which was I think around 100 employees at that point. They claimed to be very lean and quick on their feet, but I got the feeling that we were talking about different levels of volatility.

I suppose the thing that actually keeps me where I am is I have both a very long leash and a high degree of influence. Hard to level-set that against other positions I see listed.

Probably a lot. Unless you're getting paid enough to put up with it:) That being said, I think a lot people that aren't singularly money-focused overestimate how much money will outweigh other factors in their job.

I was super motivated by the money when I was doing leetcode prep, and then when negotiating and playing offers against each other. And that makes sense, the work I was doing had a direct correlation to the total compensation I ended up signing for. But now that those fat pay checks are coming in, they provide zero motivation, it's just a slightly bigger number in my bank account.

Do you have goals outside of work that the additional money will help you accomplish?

Just started my first big enterprise job yesterday. Looks like this might be true.

Is it Amazon? Sounds like Amazon.

Personally I would just work the minimum amount and do open source or other side projects (indie hacking) with the rest of the time. Then leave after 12-18 months.

Problem is when I have a job I dislike, I loose all motivation outside of work too. So even if I slack off I'll still be miserable.