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.
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.