Big Company Code vs. Startup Code: Auth as a Case Study

Every developer who's moved between a large enterprise and a smaller team has felt the whiplash. You open a pull request that would take two days to ship at a startup, and it takes two sprints at BigCorp. The code itself looks different too — not because the engineers are worse, but because the incentives are completely different. There's been a lot of discussion lately about why talented engineers end up writing mediocre code at large companies. The short answer? It's not about skill. It's abou