Every developer who's moved between a large enterprise and a smaller team has felt the whiplash. You open a pull request that would take two days to ship at a startup, and it takes two sprints at BigCorp. The code itself looks different too — not because the engineers are worse, but because the incentives are completely different. There's been a lot of discussion lately about why talented engineers end up writing mediocre code at large companies. The short answer? It's not about skill. It's about the system they're operating in. And nowhere is this more visible than in how teams handle authentication. Let me use auth as a lens to compare these two worlds — and look at the actual tools and tradeoffs involved. Why Big Companies Produce Bloated Code At large companies, code doesn't just need to work. It needs to survive committee review, satisfy platform team requirements, handle edge cases from three acquisitions ago, and avoid breaking a service that another team depends on but nobody documented. The result?…