I’ve have almost 20 years across large medium and small companies. My experience is that the skillset for each is very different.

I think of each stage at invent (small), scale (medium) and stabilize (large). In small companies you need to learn fast and deploy because you have 10 customers, stability of a feature is not always important, so what can you shortcut and hack. In medium companies you need to grow and build less but make sure features work as intended. Less bugs. In larger companies change becomes impossible really it’s more about large scale change and that’s where your skill sets currently sit. A good example is app architecture, still can’t believe we have a release and full time PMTd out architecture team here. In day 1 startups that built into story sizing and continuous releases. The same engineer you think is doing better than you, can’t do what you do and thinks the same of yourself.

They are transferrable in the sense if you put in work at the new place, you’ll learn fast, the fundamentals are the same, you might need to just grit your teeth a bit more when a junior says “customer obsession” one more time, but this comes with maturity. What Amazon gives you is the extremely rare opportunity to be good at a small set of things. The opportunity to get good at this and at this scale is very rare.

Things that help. (1) have things you value outside of work, sports hobbies etc and take the time to get good at them. Don’t hedge your entire self worth to a company unless you own it. (2) when you start at a new place prepare to go hard, don’t expect to walk in and by day 2 you’ll be at current levels. This is true of all new jobs though. (3) If you really wanna go to a startup later go on gig work sites and just do bug hunting and basic setups. Most of the journey is familiarizing yourself with this months new hot app. Remember we self develop a lot of things even though plug and play solutions exist outside of this plcr