One thing to note about "big companies" is that everyone involved at the upper levels are rich enough to engage in recreational lawsuits. So if you say anything true about their performance, you get hit with a defamation lawsuit, possibly in a speech-hostile venue like England. The end result is a conspiracy where it's in everyone's best interest to lie about their peer's performance.
These are "APE[0] hires". Their goal is not to build a better company, their goal is to trade favors and power around a select set of elites brought together by a mutual hatred of the rest of us. You hire an APE for the same reason why royal families used to marry their daughters off - it's a way to trade power. "Worked at big companies" is a code-word for "has enough clout to play with the other lizard people in the room".
[0] Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion; the opposite of a "DEI hire"
Do you have any examples of defamation lawsuits? I've sold two companies, and have plenty of rich and upper-level exec friends, and I have never heard of a defamation lawsuit amongst tech execs.
There is definitely a stupid game where people don't tell it like it is, but in my experience it's because people don't want to deal with HR at all, and so don't do or say anything that might bring a tut-tut from HR. Because people in HR are beyond annoying...
And HR fears a wrongful-termination lawsuit, not a defamation lawsuit.
This is all in the US, though. The UK has quite different libel laws and so maybe lawsuits are more common there.
These are "APE[0] hires". Their goal is not to build a better company, their goal is to trade favors and power around a select set of elites brought together by a mutual hatred of the rest of us. You hire an APE for the same reason why royal families used to marry their daughters off - it's a way to trade power. "Worked at big companies" is a code-word for "has enough clout to play with the other lizard people in the room".
[0] Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion; the opposite of a "DEI hire"