There's a lot of truth to that. However, I think a significant number of pragmatically good situations can happen when some corporate processes are poor, but t

There's a lot of truth to that. However, I think a significant number of pragmatically good situations can happen when some corporate processes are poor, but the team you'll be working on is great, and your superior shields you to a large degree from corporate. One of the ways this happens is just that you have, say, a mixed engineering department, but your manager happens to be great. Another way is that a company got good engineering talent and culture in its formative years, and carries on, but the business or corporate side evolved distinctly. Note that in some companies this might mean that you're only one great manager quitting away from being exposed to a ruthless corporate culture grown by stack-ranking Hunger Games and deadly-sharp elbows. Or it could mean that your team's brilliant product design and solid engineering end up having the market opportunity ball dropped by the dysfunction of others just going through the motions. And maybe you should've suspected that, based on hints during the hiring process.