[jtonz]

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.

[war1025]

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.