I've seen plenty of programmers who had experience working at smaller or mobile studios move to AAA games and many go in reverse. Engineering solutions to code problems is pretty universal - there's generally a thing that needs to be built and there are established ways to evaluate the code written to do that thing (e.g. performant, legible, etc.).
The circumstances under which the engineers do the work is different and the scope of individual contributions is different between large teams and small, but the engineers are still doing the same general thing - writing code to solve abstract problems. When we hire engineers for game dev, be it AAA or indie, we look for candidates who can work with a team and have a knack for solving problems with performant, legible, and elegant code. Whether they earned their experience on big AAA games or smaller indie or mobile titles doesn't matter, as long as they can solve the problems we need them to solve.
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