Why do big companies suck?

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

this is a great article. true of any large company.

Division of labor. In smaller places, people wear several hats. Some interesting and exciting, others not.

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.

Better managements work to mitigate this. But it's an ongoing struggle, and the dark side calls.