Smaller firms may have smaller codebase and less complex infrastructure and processes to get familiar with. Learning all of that wouldn’t take more than a week or a month, tops.
Larger, public companies like FAANGS will often have completely custom stacks, specialized developer tools and a ton of checks before anything you write hits production. Learning to navigate this will take a lot longer. IIRC Facebook has a bootcamp of several weeks (months?) just to get new engineers familiar with their shit.
In either case, I personally don’t think it’s a “wash” since even at the bigger company it’s not like you’re not doing anything and once you get familiar with the stack you can be productive af.
