There’s a bit of both. In favour of a), enterprise programmers are typically less enthusiastic than people from smaller companies, and also generally more narrowly specialized—they may deal with some small area of a larger system, where a startup employee has to be able to handle everything that comes their way.
In favour of b), enterprise systems can have higher demands in terms of robustness (your bank going down is worse than twitter going down), scalability (most small companies haven’t taken off in user numbers yet and probably never will), the amount of legacy code that needs to be read and dealt with, and the size and complexity of the existing code base and database(s), and the need for integration between a number of disparate systems managed by different teams.
There’s a bit of both. In favour of a), enterprise programmers are typically less enthusiastic than people from smaller companies, and also generally more narrowly specialized—they may deal with some small area of a larger system, where a startup employee has to be able to handle everything that comes their way.
In favour of b), enterprise systems can have higher demands in terms of robustness (your bank going down is worse than twitter going down), scalability (most small companies haven’t taken off in user numbers yet and probably never will), the amount of legacy code that needs to be read and dealt with, and the size and complexity of the existing code base and database(s), and the need for integration between a number of disparate systems managed by different teams.