Worked for two Fortune 500 real estate financial services companies. The pay was excellent. If I had family to support, I would not have left. The money was too

Worked for two Fortune 500 real estate financial services companies. The pay was excellent. If I had family to support, I would not have left. The money was too good. The work was unfulfilling; brown-nosing, meetings, horrendous code base. Refactoring does not exist in the enterprise vocabulary. The managers usually have masters in IT not CS so they weren't in touch with the engineers. We were forced to use expensive crappy SCM like ClearCase which required two administrators to make sense of it. All code was prescribed straight out of Microsoft enterprise application patterns. I felt like a drone. I left on my own accord. I most enjoy the freedom to think outside the box. Job happiness level is high, pay could be better.