Yup, as with most generalizations, it misses all nuance. This wasn’t meant as a big analysis of large vs. small companies and working conditions. And as I’ve said in some earlier post, different people will have different things that make them happy at work. In my case, I won’t develop at a large corporate company. CCP is globally about 600+, in Iceland it is under 300. It is a good size- small enough that it’s still personal, and big enough that you don’t get as much small-company silliness like you describe.

Granted, Google is probably in a class by itself. But now I’ve started contracting for Mozilla (600ish employees, >$100 million annual revenue) and it’s pretty similar. I’ve heard that places like Microsoft and Apple treat their employees very well too.

Of course, game development has a reputation of not being as pleasant as less glamorous forms of development work, like say web standards development. Maybe the big *gaming* companies are all terrible to work at, for all I know.

On the flip side, I’ve heard lots of horror stories about tiny companies where you personally know the CEO, but he’s a self-absorbed jerk who appoints his friends and relatives as managers and lets them do whatever they want to employees. Although again, this isn’t specifically gaming-related.