One piece of https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109641161831440978 I find interesting is how many people were sure this guy was going to be super effective because he's a productive hacker.
At this point, it's sort of a trope that BigCo engineers are often not particularly productive in a startup environment because so many are highly adapted to a BigCo environment, but of course the opposite is true as well and extremely effective startup engineers often have mediocre productivity at BigCos for the opposite reason.
Of course there are people who are highly effective in both environments, but they're not common and, without other info, it seems like a bad bet that any particular person will be highly productive if they switch environments.
Anyway, what I find interesting is the implied mental model of people who think BigCo engineers are ineffective at startups but startup engineers are effective at BigCos. Like, what's their mental model of how BigCos work, how they make so much money, etc.?
Obdisclaimer: I never worked in a startup.
I find it weird that people think of this as a single-dimensional difference. I'd expect that there are dimensions that are much more important for most people that aren't strongly correlated with company size/startupness.
An example of that would be what balance is struck between trusting empirical arguments and trusting logical arguments. On one extreme, a given company might think that they never express anything in sufficient precision to even use modus ponens. On the other extreme, a company might think that one can always choose the best approach to a problem by pure reasoning, without experimentation.
Another example (which arguably is correlated more strongly with company size) is the expected amount of deferring to authority.
