I've went from a startup to a large (15k+) company and back to a small company. The overall experience is that it's hard to foresee what workplace factors are

I've went from a startup to a large (15k+) company and back to a small company. The overall experience is that it's hard to foresee what workplace factors are important to you. Perhaps the ones you take for granted, but won't be at the other place. After leaving the startup, I had high hopes for better organized workplace at larger company. Boy, I was wrong. Untill I took a goot root at the large company, I never imagined programmers and managers could create so many, countless even, artificial problems. Every tool in our toolbox was inadequate, but changing that was next to impossible (decisions taken at the uppermost level). Most people exhibited the ``don't touch it if it works'' attitude that drove me almost crazy. The software would pass the tests but a lot of weirdness was swept under the proverbial rug with copious amounts of special-cased code. Software delivery took months. We were implementing features in an ungainly way, and had no way of reporting a much better implementation of very similar feature was possible on this hardware. The list goes on... Now I'm happy at a 60 strong company. We aren't a software shop, but a small dev team builds software for internal use, marketing purposes and for our co-operants. We iterate quickly and deliver features in between 3 hours and 3 weeks. Every person in team has vertical responsibility -- oversees all steps of development of his feature. We are in touch with users (both internal and external ones) and work with them closely (that turned out to be an important factor to me I never appreciated before -- I thought I'm a lone wolf, turns out it's not the case). But the best thing for me: people genuinely like using my software. Feels great! :-)