Not necessarily. I went from a smallish (40 person) company to a huge fortune 100 megacorp which has hip new offices and wins awards for being a great place to work and they flat out told me I was outside their pay range for the position so I'd have to accept a 4% paycut to go there. Maybe I'm terrible at negotiating but it was the first time I had a company dictate the salary rather than do the "desired salary" song and dance.

I do sometimes feel like it is all a massive fraud perpetrated by HR people who, in exchange for some hip decor and free food, can get engineers to trade raw salary.

All in all I learned that all the external reputation, perks and lime green paint in the world don't matter one whit compared to the competence of your immediate peers and you certainly don't need to go to a namebrand software shop for that.

written on a mobile phone so apologies for any egregious misspellings