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levels of accountability. If you are a graphic or web person like I was, you will have to answer to multiple levels within your own department: your peers, a team lead, a copywriter, and a creative director. There are also middle managers and heads of other departments who could have a direct or indirect influence over your work. That's potentially a lot of bosses for someone at the bottom! This can be quite stressful.

If you personally are not a fan of meetings, then a big company is definitely not an atmosphere that you will enjoy. There are department meetings, brainstorming meetings, quality assurance meetings, progress meetings, conference calls etc. I was never a fan of the department phone conference call.

Advancement can be tricky. If you are at the bottom and you have no aspirations towards middle management, then your opportunities for advancement are limited. Your best option in that case is to transfer to anther department where you could get a potentially higher salary. You find yourself at the bottom rung again of a whole different ladder.

If you are a salaried employee, then you aren't getting paid for potential overtime or weekend work. There is always the possibility that your boss will have you work extra hours. There may be other incentives of course, but "time-and-a-half" pay isn't usually one of them.

Do you have to commute to your big company? I never liked spending an hour each way in traffic to get to and from work. Perhaps you don't have that experience, but I commuted that way for years. I eventually did move closer to work to avoid this long dive. As a consequence, my rent went up significantly, as I was now located in a much more expensive area.

This last point comes from personal experience. I went through a company merger. Another even bigger company bought out the big company that I worked for. As I was a web designer/developer for the majority of my career at the previous big company, nearly all of my work has since disappeared in the aftermath of merger. Make sure to keep some sort of record of all of your duties and things that you have done. Otherwise, you may find that you have nothing to put in your portfolio.

How important to you is company loyalty? Our parents worked at the same company for 20-30 years. The fact that I worked at my big company for over seven years is pretty rare nowadays. Most of my coworkers stayed at a job for a year to two years and then got hired somewhere else. Are big companies still as loyal to their

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