Again, this could be coming from my lack of experience in this world.

While your points are well taken, I'm not sure how those three points change between small & large companies. I'm going to focus on "WARN": the other two seem to be less contentious.

Working in small companies, if I'm not going to be able to make my deadline, the proverbial buck stops at me -- so I'd better own up to it, and tell my boss why it happened, and more importantly, what I'm doing to fix it.

Is it just that in a large company I can spread blame around a bit more? "It's not really my fault -- my team lead wasn't on the ball, we had too much pushback from sales, and if we could cut some of the dead weight from this team..."

Is that the issue? Or is it something I don't see?