Agreed, I got paid to hack a VMS mainframe, buffer overflows, etc at 22, trust me it wasn't in the official job description but I found the company $3 million in lost rev.
Honestly, unless you enjoy reading about the company you work for in Techcrunch I don't get the whole startup hype for employees. Founders are somewhat likely to get a decent cheque but employees are not. For employees the EV doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
At my last employer, I was on a very small team that wrote code that made GBP 2M/year pure profit (minus the salaries of 3-4 people for a couple of weeks, in the first year). That 2M covered the bonuses of two execs, and I got a raise of slightly below inflation (and left shortly after - and they had no idea why).
However I was a quick study and learned that truly there was no I in team. I created a win-win situation, and soon our sales team was dramatically outperforming other regions. Turns out the sales staff knew who to call who already had the service and merely needed to be added to the billing system. There was no way that that much revenue could be sold by one person, it really did require a team.
The worst thing I found was a report that listed expiring credit cards and allowed entry of arbitrary dates in the future for which to run the report. I had to wait until the C-levels visited and hand them a stack of paper with the numbers on them to get anyone to pay attention to it.
aside: Seriously Oracle for OCaml? That's awesome, I'm a big F# fan.
One data point, I've never found a large corporate job where I didn't feel straightjacketed and annoyed with my bosses/politics/organizational inertia. A small company fits me much better, it's mainly a personality thing.
Honestly, unless you enjoy reading about the company you work for in Techcrunch I don't get the whole startup hype for employees. Founders are somewhat likely to get a decent cheque but employees are not. For employees the EV doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.