[gesman]

Agree with "brand recognition" - its a serious advantage for employees of large corp. Large corps are vulnerable to losing top talent because they usually can't match market due to strict internal hierarchy policies. Quicker way to get promoted at large corp - prove your skills, leave on good terms, gain visibility and titles elsewhere and then re-join large corp at a much higher position.

Regulations:

Large corps are much stricter regulated and this adds to your responsibilities to do boring stuff.

Permissions:

Large corps spending lots of resources for reinventing and improving systems of access controls and permissions as well as sets of exceptions to such systems.

Average worker age:

20+ something for startup, 40-50+ something for corps.

Accessibility of top management:

Startup: you knock the door and talk to the guy, Large corp: you send email to C*O of large corp and get no reply not because he is busy, but because his secretary pre-filtered emails and discarded yours.

[GFischer]

"Quicker way to get promoted at large corp - prove your skills, leave on good terms, gain visibility and titles elsewhere and then re-join large corp at a much higher position."

That one irks me no end, but it's in my experience true. Also, in smaller companies, "title inflation" is a thing, I've seen companies you can get named whichever job title you prefer in exchange for a lower or no raise in salary.

And afterwards, said employees spin their "inflated" job title into a better job at large corp. (which they usually are qualified to do, but they have a leg vs equally qualified internal employees with a lesser title).

Edit: my experience applies mainly to NON software large corps., which have less ways to gauge the skill levels of internal employees in IT. Also applies to the government sector (same as credentials and certifications).

[rvolkan]

you didn't work for a competitive software corp. did you? to me, all three are wrong.

-Regulations? if you are good, you can do anything you want. you are powerful. regulations are there to stop dreamers. dreamers are stopped in startup world a lot harsher. -Permissions? only around %2 of employees work on that. actually less. do you think those kind of systems are worth the effort? (works! done.) -Avg worker age? this is simply not true. the acquihires we had, were older than my -corp- team avg.

[gesman]

I worked at both, but there are perhaps exceptions.

[rvolkan]

Me too, but corp culture perhaps changes as fast as software development practices change.

[Mengue]

Thanks a lot for the additional points.