Over 20 years in the workforce, here's my notions from working for:

3 big-corps (over 30,000 employees each)

- Huge well organized career ladder

- lots of corporate resources for growing a career

- more possible to change jobs without changing companies, usually through changes in divisions

- good places to move up title-wise between smaller companies

- work tends to be more specialized, you'll end up doing really only one kind of work and if you want to do something else you need to change jobs internally

- less flexibility and personal touches

- benefits are usually pretty good

- you will be not much more than a number to the higher organizational units in the company

- can get you positioned to work on hugely impactful work that will affect millions of people

- time to impact can be very long...

- tend to be very bottom-line focused and conservative

- lots of processes and procedures

- as a performer, lower stress, as you move up management ranks gets medium stressed

- may be a dozen or more layers between the lowest employee and the CEO

- hiring and recruiting is a well oiled machine

- these companies decide where they want to be and simply put muscle behind to make it happen

1 med-corp (< 2,000 employees)

- definitely some aspects of working for a big-corp, mostly bureaucratic nonsense

- they're trying really hard to become a big-co so more flexibility and risk taking is possible

- jobs tend to be less specialized in some cases

- less opportunity to move around, but you'll also find that these are the places with 20+ year employees

- tend to have better benefits in order to attract talent from big-co, but can't always match on pay (often in denial about the state of the market)

- feels like several small-corps (~100) in practice due to divisional structure, even the lowest employee is only 5-6 steps from the CEO

- most tasks are 1-5 people deep, so if one person isn't good, they can usually scrounge up another person who can take it on

- recruiting is functional, but thin

- growth desires can sometimes get in the way of sustaining operations

1 small-corp (~100)

- I didn't actually have a good experience at this place, so I may be colored by it

- there's often more people available to take on specialized tasks, but still lots of multi-hat wearing

- most tasks are 1 person deep, so if they aren't good, the entire company feels it and grinds to a halt

- very easy to get overwhelmed picking up slack for less capable staff

- everybody knows everybody

- organizational "feel" will be deeply linked to the personality of the C-level execs, they'll know you by name and have a reputation for you in their mind

- a good size to put behind one major product push, or 5-6 small ones, but might be too few people to handle

- are often in the middle of huge growth which means everything is in chaos

6 tiny-cos (<20 staff)

- imagine every kind of job there is, welcome to doing all of them, often at once

- in terms of professional capacity, I grew the most in these kind of companies (while career titles grew the most in big-corps)

- if you have a good team, can be extremely rewarding

- better than 90% chance that things will go bust and you'll experience hours and stress unlike anything you can imagine

- everybody is customer support and sales

- absolutely no room not to pull your own weight

- company direction is dictated almost entirely by the capabilities of just a handful of core people...who may not even be the C-levels or founders

- work should be very focused on getting an MVP out the door and getting initial customers, then moving up to the next size

- often are getting ready to grow very fast which can be very tough

- everything is always in chaos, but you have huge impact on the company almost every day

- I love working in these places, but can't do them back to back, the stress is crippling