The engineer at the startup may have a broad scope of responsibility and ownership, but also might be working on relatively small systems that have not needed to scale yet.

> Interesting, you've got it absolutely the wrong way around.

Maybe. That's why you need to put your scope on the resume :)

I had a CTO title 15 years ago. The complexity of what we were building was a joke compared to what I own now as a lowly "tech lead manager". And in fact back then I wouldn't even be able to comprehend how complex things can get.

There's a lot of cogs at big companies, but the impact of the entire company is huge. Startups usually have small impact. Usually at these big companies there's quite a few atlases holding the entire world up.