Because big companies are playing a different game. Their position in the market, the amount of money they have, the kind of problems they have...it's all very different from a start-up. And therefore the culture is different. It might be a great culture to work in, it's just not a startup culture.

I don't necessarily disagree that big companies can't have startup atmospheres, but a small startup usually has a lot more on the line. The relative lack of funding and the pressure to execute well is much more of a reality at a startup than it is at Microsoft.

Because you lose the intimacy of start-up culture at scale.

I beg to differ. This is the thing that people misunderstand about Microsoft.

When you work at Microsoft you don't just "work at Microsoft". You work for a TEAM in Microsoft. For example, last year I was an intern on Word. The Word client team consists of maybe ~30 people. You don't feel like you're working with 40k people, but instead a small group of around 30. And you could see how it can become even more granular when you take dev/test/pm disciplines into account.

We have lunch together, we go out after work together, we play board games after work, we do all sorts of fun things together.

It may be fair to say that a giant company should not have a start up culture, though I would find it ludicrous to say that ~teams~ within big companies should not have a start up culture.

* Caveat: Because Microsoft is so big, you'll find that cultures can vary between teams. For example, Bing is rumored to have one of the worst cultures in the company. A culture of excessive work, excessive competition, and overall unpleasant times and people.

Sure, but don't you have to deal with politics and policies from the rest of the company, or occasionally interface with bureaucrats from other departments, other buildings even? Working in a team of 30 people at a big company is never anything like working in a company of 30 people.

Oh, I agree. I don't think working here is like working at a startup (in some good ways and some bad ways). I just thought that it was unfair to say that only startups are allowed to have "intimacy".

I'm interning at a Big Tech company currently, and I'd disagree. While I can't speak to experiences as a full-time SDE, I very rarely interface with people outside my team (of ~10 people); from what I understand from my mentor, this experience is pretty universal for SDEs, though it diminishes as you take more senior roles in the company.

My work and a given intern's work has literally nothing in common; in fact, talking with other interns feels like talking to people working at a completely different company.

It varies depending on where you go within the company.

In particular, you don't have to go that far up (say, the aiming for SDE3 end of SDE2?) before there are pretty good odds that you'll either be a client of lots of other teams or have lots of clients.