Sure, you could argue such people are needed only at the early stages of a company, and counterproductive when the company gets bigger. But I don't buy that. Why then are big companies asking all the time: "Oh, where's our internal startup spirit? How can we bring it back?" Right after firing the people who encapsulated that spirit, for being "hard to manage".
I think this trend to talk about startup practices in large orgs is more executive nostalgia and a complaint about all the processes put in place to catch mistakes that have been made before.
The same people as developers would be pursuing rewrites of rock-solid 20+ year mature software projects because there's a trendy framework.
Large organizations don't have 'startup spirit' because 'startup' companies fail. Employees of large mature orgs with 6000 employees didn't sign on to a company that's got a good chance of not existing next quarter. They're not taking massive risks and throwing halfbaked features into a brand new product with 1 client hoping to get bought by facebook or maybe an insurance company.
If those big companies are really complaining about not having startup spirit maybe they should provide an exit for the VCs and aquihire (briefly because the engineers will all leave asap) a startup!
Sometimes it is not even about the "startup spirit", but more like "why is it that we didn't do any projects of significance in the last year, and why is our incident rate 3x from what it was just 3 quarters ago, and why are all these migrations not finished yet?"
Because sometimes all they're after is for slideware on GenAI. The people they fired encapsulated a spirit of innovation that doesn't fit the operating model and therefore is of no value to them.
