Being surrounded by like minded people definitely helps along with working on things you find interesting. One disparity I'd say I've found is large corporations don't put a value on developers the same as a software company does. Within a software company, software is the core value of the business, so it gets the highest attention. I've seen larger businesses not willing to spend for 2 monitors for developers, which would be an obvious worth in productivity in most cases. This can usually be seen in the general attitude of the company, is IT there to support the business or to be a key differentiator for your company. If the environment does have those things the next area of course is compensation, does your developers salary match that of google/oracle, while you may pay better than similar companies, check how it compares to the known software shops on somewhere like glassdoor and see how you rank.