[jsnell]

There are things that are easier to achieve in a big company than in a small one. Working on products used by almost everyone means that even small incremental improvements will have a larger effect than the whole product of an average startup has. Even a smaller Google property is probably on a much larger scale than the successful main product of a startup. There's better infrastructure and more machines to throw at problems than elsewhere, making it easier to solve really hard problems.

I'm sure that at some point Google will go the way of any large company and become an organization of middle managers shuffling paper around with nothing getting done, the rot hasn't set in yet. There's a big cultural difference to a standard big corp. (No, I don't mean the food or any other shiny baubles).

And while nobody is going to get fabulously rich from Google stock options/grants any more, I have absolutely no complaints about my total compensation.