A company with ~1000 software engineers is probably in the top 100 in software company sizes in the world, especially if they are not a sweat shop consultancy, bank or defense contractor, which are all usually large companies themselves.
I mean, the vast majority of software engineers in the world are not in software engineering companies. If we are purposefully limiting ourselves to Bay Tech companies, then sure, I guess 1,000 software engineers is big. But the companies in the world that are around the top 100 employers in the world, like you suggested, these places have 150,000 to 250,000 employees. 1,000 programmers for internal CRUD and system integration is quite realistic; the IT staff alone for a company that size is like 5,000 people, that is not even accounting for their actual business (which these days almost always has a major software component).
This is also not including large government employers like the military, intelligence, or all of the large services like the mail.
