[curtisholmes]

> A giant Internet company such as Amazon can leverage the output of a software engineer far more efficiently than a startup

Really? I doubt that. I would imagine software engineers could be much more efficient without the drag of a large company

[DennisP]

I think he just means that code has more impact when you have ten million users than when you have ten thousand.

[_delirium]

On some things yes, on other things no. It depends mostly on whether the engineer is doing anything that benefits from significant infrastructure and an existing customer base. If you need (or could significantly benefit from) either of those, you might have more impact at Google or Amazon. For example, a data-mining idea might pan out better if you have: 1) google-sized server farms; and 2) a local mirror of the entire internet that you can run queries over.

[batista]

A single, simple, frontpage change can mean millions of new revenue for Amazon, say.

It means squat in some obscure little startup.