I started my career at a startup and worked there for 3 years. Since then I bounced around at various companies of all sizes. Smallest company was 5 people. Lar

I started my career at a startup and worked there for 3 years. Since then I bounced around at various companies of all sizes. Smallest company was 5 people. Largest was over 70,000. A company is a miniature command economy that is insulated from the larger free market and interacts with it as a whole. I'm skeptical of "small autonomous teams" inside a large company. That sounds like a VP or Director who wasn't able to find greater support from the rest of the company on his pet project and managed to secure a small budget to run everything himself. Unless you're talking about a small startup that was acquired by the large company and was granted autonomy to continue business as usual while the larger org decides what to do with the team and IP. It's impossible to say "being a software developer in a big corporate is <Cultural Norm X>" because each manager runs their own team with their own managerial style. You'll find every stress level and every team structure in a single large corp. Culture wise it's nothing but a collection of diverse people. But I can say this about software projects at large companies: you will have many stakeholders on any given project, whether or not you are aware of it. Even if you are given "autonomy," if your project is successful it will eventually come into contact with the larger org and you will suddenly find new people with all-new demands on the project. Satisfying all these people is impossible and stress-inducing but that's part of why large corps pay so much better.