Technically - Big tech companies have the advantage of big projects, on average good leadership, and a high tech bar. Generally there is someone who knows how

Technically - Big tech companies have the advantage of big projects, on average good leadership, and a high tech bar. Generally there is someone who knows how to do something in the Big Co's way, and you can learn that technique. Most Big Cos do not support going off the reservation however, and there are usually sacred cows which poking will just result in termination. As an example, even if something is an internal tool used by two people on your team, and that is all it ever will be - you are probably going to be required to make a redundant deployment with unit and integration tests, and full CI/CD pipeline. The other major advantage of Big tech is typically financial, there is no guarantee that this will last indefinitely - but over the last 15 years the top tech firms have paid better than all other options by a wide margin. This isn't necessarily unique to big tech and could apply to any tech company considered a "top firm". These trends will likely continue until tech firms paying top salaries either become too bloated to innovate and instead focus on building strange non-profitable vanity projects - or are outmatched by companies using lower cost engineers.