The environment at a large shop is more constraining, and the people are more specialized. You'd go from being a small cog in a very large machine to being the entire machine yourself. At a large shop it's like being in bootcamp, everything is systematized. Transitioning from that to a green field can be a shock when you have become too reliant on the rest of the machine.
Conversely someone coming from a startup wont understand working in a large team where progress is more methodical (slower). They will seek to circumvent processes they see as slow or useless. Perhaps they will try to 're-engineer' towards things they are more familiar with. In the process they may cause a net loss for the entire team.
In general I'd say its easier to go up than down. If you're used to the functions of a large organization it would be difficult to scale that back (network engineers that can't work without Cisco gear for instance). Someone coming from a startup is likely to be adaptive, and I'd rather have a generalist in a large organization, than a specialist in a small one.
Although I'm from an IT background not Dev so YMMV. The limit of my programming is single page perl/python scripts.
People that have worked in start-ups are very well suited to being trouble-shooters in a large organization, and people that have worked for a big company stand a chance of running a start-up that interfaces / sells to big companies because they can relate to the party on the other side.
I'd think that it's a net win to have experience about the other side of the table, and that your skills are actually worth more by having been 'on the other side of the line' for a while.
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The environment at a large shop is more constraining, and the people are more specialized. You'd go from being a small cog in a very large machine to being the entire machine yourself. At a large shop it's like being in bootcamp, everything is systematized. Transitioning from that to a green field can be a shock when you have become too reliant on the rest of the machine.
Conversely someone coming from a startup wont understand working in a large team where progress is more methodical (slower). They will seek to circumvent processes they see as slow or useless. Perhaps they will try to 're-engineer' towards things they are more familiar with. In the process they may cause a net loss for the entire team.
In general I'd say its easier to go up than down. If you're used to the functions of a large organization it would be difficult to scale that back (network engineers that can't work without Cisco gear for instance). Someone coming from a startup is likely to be adaptive, and I'd rather have a generalist in a large organization, than a specialist in a small one.
Although I'm from an IT background not Dev so YMMV. The limit of my programming is single page perl/python scripts.
People that have worked in start-ups are very well suited to being trouble-shooters in a large organization, and people that have worked for a big company stand a chance of running a start-up that interfaces / sells to big companies because they can relate to the party on the other side.
I'd think that it's a net win to have experience about the other side of the table, and that your skills are actually worth more by having been 'on the other side of the line' for a while.