The big life lesson I got is: there's no correlation between Fortune 500 companies and good management practice. As a software engineer, I was never happier th

The big life lesson I got is: there's no correlation between Fortune 500 companies and good management practice. As a software engineer, I was never happier than the job I took with a smaller local firm after quitting a 500. The firm paid competitively (no longer getting those sweet Fortune 500 stock options, but who cares the stock market's a crap-shoot anyway and the stock I got from the old company is already past its peak value right now as it is) and my manager was the best I've ever had. Being in a bad management chain at a major corp can make you miserable. I've found it to be worth it to switch to a smaller corp with a better management chain. (All of that having been said: smaller companies can be more vulnerable to market disruption so of course sometimes one trades out the stress of bad management with the stress of maybe not having a job in six months. But as Google just demonstrated, working at the big firms isn't really a guarantee there either).