i can't speak for all big companies, but i'm happy at google, and a large part of that is that everyone i work with cares about doing things the right way, and

i can't speak for all big companies, but i'm happy at google, and a large part of that is that everyone i work with cares about doing things the right way, and is willing to budget the time to do so. for another datapoint, my girlfriend works at salesforce, and she is not just supported but encouraged to work on innovative projects and big new problems. when i was working at startups one of my largest sources of stress was having to constantly rush shoddy products out of the door because people were obsessed with beating some real or hypothetical competitor to market, never mind that any clients we did get to install our products either gave up early or tied us up with loads of support issues that we again had to fix on a quick-release, ad-hoc basis rather than systematically and correctly. incidentally my resume says "phd dropout", so if the lack of a big-name university on your phd makes you disinclined to apply to places like google or salesforce, you should at least reconsider. in my experience these companies care a lot less about that sort of branding than they possibly did in the past.