smaller companies are more exposed to customer demands. whether that makes for better or worse code depends on the team and company culture. the demand to ship something right this second and is existential for the company tends to prioritize shipping over well engineered code. At the opposite end of the spectrum, being totally insulated from such demands can lead to some really nice design docs, and code that might be the epitome of software engineering, but it also takes forever to actually ship anything because there's less of a forcing function, which also leads to complacency. there's a happy medium between the two that's optimal, though finding the right one is challenging.