He missed an important point: that most of the work itself in many (not all) big companies is not exciting, more like routine maintenance. A friend got a PhD in CS from Northwestern and now all he does is maintain email servers for a BigCo (essentially). He has a pager so that "clients" can contact him if anything goes wrong
Division of labor. In smaller places, people wear several hats. Some interesting and exciting, others not.<p>In large organizations, things are more segregated and stratified. If you aren't in one of the interesting/exciting roles, all you get is suck.<p>Better managements work to mitigate this. But it's an ongoing struggle, and the dark side calls.