The big take away for me here is: does the company see engineers as a "cost center" or a "profit center"?
You can almost directly correlate the "traditional" approach to seeing engineering as a cost center, while startups/S.V. style companies see engineering as a profit center, and they treat their employees accordingly.
I think part of this is because in SV a software engineer is closer to the value creation of the end product. In a traditional company, the software developers are more of an enabling function than a primary one
You can almost directly correlate the "traditional" approach to seeing engineering as a cost center, while startups/S.V. style companies see engineering as a profit center, and they treat their employees accordingly.