In regards to mega companies, it's hard/impossible to talk about culture in a meaningful way because the organization is so large. For a personal example, sayin

In regards to mega companies, it's hard/impossible to talk about culture in a meaningful way because the organization is so large. For a personal example, saying "I work at IBM" is not terribly informative because IBM has more employees than most island nations have citizens, and its branches and divisions are extremely different. Some are doing really cool, cutting edge work, some are doing uncool, arthritic, blue-polyester-suit-style work. And the culture may not be homogenous across those either. Considering two "uncool" divisions, maybe one, despite being uncool, has a really innovation-oriented exciting culture and the other has more of a who-took-my-stapler vibe. Maybe the same holds true for divisions doing cool work. I would venture to say that this more or less applies at any company of a sufficiently enormous size. It's just hard to generalize. I will definitely agree with posters here who have said different strokes for different folks. Megacorps of all kinds, regardless of internal culture, are just different from startups.