I can contribute a few factors I've observed working at my Large Company of Choice (starts with a G). Personally, I believe that, in the ways that matter, engineers at larger companies are
more efficient than their friends at smaller ones, while simultaneously getting
less done. It's basically a "throughput vs. latency" problem: your work has a larger impact, but you don't see that impact for a very long time, so it feels less productive:
* Existing codebases need to be maintained. Small companies tend to be younger, which naturally comes with fewer existing systems that require maintenance, and those systems that do exist are generally smaller. The time spent keeping a large production system up and running feels wasted, but it's absolutely not, especially when you consider the alternative is letting the thing fall over and losing the revenue, users, etc. Contrast this against a smaller company where more projects are fresh and satisfying to write.
* Lots of work centers around adding features instead of greenfield projects with no history. Most of the code is already written, much of the infrastructure is already in place, and oftentimes the problem is similar to one that was solved previously. You end up writing less code to get more results, as opposed to a greenfield project where you write tons of code to even arrive at a baseline.
* Larger companies almost certainly have more irons in the fire than smaller ones. While on an individual level it's annoying to have to wait for input from someone who has half a dozen projects on their plate at once, on a company level this makes sense: when you have to put fifty features into production, you don't organize each one individually, you create a pipeline composed of people and run your work through it.
* As a result, projects at larger companies have more stakeholders, which means you need to get agreement from more parties before you can move forward. Also, you're likely not the only thing on those peoples' radars, meaning you'll have to fight for their attention.
* Larger and older companies tend to encapsulate their lessons learned into this pipeline. I'll hazard a guess that this is what people mean when they talk about "institutional failures" led to damages like Well Fargo or Facebook/CA, etc: no individuals failed, instead the system put into place to pipeline their work was faulty. The "human pipeline" of a larger organization was almost certainly built up in response to a long series of nonpublic failures. More quality in the form of fewer such failures, at the expense of higher latency.
* Politics is a thing. Larger companies almost uniformly have career ladders, with the aim of giving people a way to advance their career besides "take a CTO position somewhere else and come back at a L+1 18 months later." This means at least some of engineers' time will be spent marketing themselves for promotion rather than writing code. This often means choosing and prioritizing their projects by biggest expected impact. This has consequences if that engineer is a stakeholder in some other engineer's project and they disagree on the importance of that project to their respective careers.
* Finally, there's a human component to this. In my experience, the sorts of people who join smaller organizations and get tons of work done tend to be younger and less tied down. You're not going to be working at a 6-days-a-week 8am-8pm startup with a wife and children. You're going to be looking to put in your time and head off to live your life. Meanwhile your management is still going to demand big things from you, so you end up becoming efficient out of necessity.
I'll leave you with the upside to this so you don't come away thinking large organizations are hellish slave pits: The impact of your work is larger simply by virtue of your being at a large company. I won't go into details, but I work in a group that puts in months of work to move revenue by shavings of a percentage point here and there. When you finally launch, you end up thinking "man, all that work for a 0.5% improvement?" when in reality the baseline of that improvement is staggeringly large.