I have been fortunate to work on some large projects, in excess of 100 programmers. The process of working on a large corporate software project is a skill in itself. You rarely have any choice of platform or tools, and to make changes such as to database schema, you have to know the corporate change protocol.

Some people disdain such environments, but some problems are in a class where nothing else will suffice. I know that I could design and implement a system that could take an image of a license plate, do a database lookup, and insert a billing record. I could not do the same for a system that did 20K plates per hour.