I've been at big companies and really small startups. I've tended to alternate between them. My Big Company experience was they broke us up into smallish team

I've been at big companies and really small startups. I've tended to alternate between them. My Big Company experience was they broke us up into smallish teams (6-20 people), which made us work more like a small company in many respects. There was a lot of process, but it was actually a good discipline to have. (Its always startling when I started in academia the "code repo" was CVS and not hardly used..) My big company code was more thoroughly reviewed and frankly better.. I learned a lot from those reviews and being given the time to design before coding. Having to do it all at a small company you learn a lot too. Big companies actually measured productivity, and had a processes.. Much less input into what we were going to do. Though it wasn't all great: I was put on the "Morale Committee" because morale was low. This didn't help my Morale, but we did get the company to do some ice-cream socials.