Sure. I enjoyed the people I worked with at the big companies quite a bit. In fact, almost as a rule I've enjoyed my coworkers more at big companies than at sma

Sure. I enjoyed the people I worked with at the big companies quite a bit. In fact, almost as a rule I've enjoyed my coworkers more at big companies than at small ones. People were generally more laid back and pleasant to work around, and while I found the number of "lifers" a little unsettling, it was more of a temporal mismatch than a cultural one (I was the youngest in my department by at least 10 years and had no inclination to settle down where the job was). Now, I'm at a small-ish company and I've got far more responsibility than I did at either of the big companies, but that's mostly because there are fewer people around to handle the work that needs to be done. I'm the de-facto DBA for the product I work on largely because I understand databases better than anyone on the team. That has turned into me needing to learn Hadoop "yesterday" because the need is there and the one Hadoop guy we had just quit. At a big company this doesn't happen because big companies are, well, big. That's comforting because there's almost always someone who can give you a hand. It's also somewhat limiting because there's almost always someone more specialized in an area you want to branch out into, and they'll get assignments because working in that area is their job. If you want to wear a lot of hats, big companies aren't the best place - but if you want to have folks around who can help you out, small companies aren't going to be able to offer that kind of hand-holding. That said, if I could go to a big company and get similar respect and responsibility to what I currently enjoy, I absolutely would. As an example of a big company role that would be fascinating - I've got a friend who's a VP of Consumer Analytics at one of the major banks in the US. His job is literally to comb through data and make recommendations regarding bank policy based upon that data. For an example of his work, the last time I spoke with him, he was working on figuring out the optimal amount of cash to keep in each ATM across the country. He gets considerable latitude to do things however he wants - all that matters is the results. For instance, he tends to write a lot of R code himself, but his assignments do not include the phrase "Implement this system using R" or anything near it. He gets to decide what works and he is only responsible for the output and not his modus operandi.