Pros: Overall good benefits, but mostly around secondary things like amenities and free food.

Cons: Too much stress around ratings and lay-offs.

Pros: The people are pretty fantastic, as are the perks -- food, HR really does have innovative ways of taking care of you, and transportation options. Google has been willing to open up offices where its people want to be, which has been great. There is a lot of opportunity to travel and communicate your vision to a wider audience. I appreciate some of the hard work that has gone into building the culture, and Google tries hard to maintain that. There is a sense of legacy, and that great things are yet to come. This is not something that is easily sustained, yet there is so much effort here that it just might work.

Cons: Certainly, it's a big company. It tries hard to not be. It tries to rekindle some of the old things that made it unique, but it seems like a lost cause for the most part. There is much less opportunity to shoot to the top. There is less and less exposure to people outside your organization and too far above your management chain. There is a lot of work to be done, and Google is pretty cheap about the way that work gets accomplished. It puts added burden on many people, including engineers and lower-level managers. Getting actual things accomplished and seeing how it fits into the company goals has been hard.

Pros: When I was at Google, the company was growing rapidly, and I was able to grow with the company. I was quickly promoted and benefitted from having a lot of senior, experienced people to learn from. I got to work on products used by billions of people, which is an impact that few other places can match.

Cons: Google has a lot of bad managers. They spend a ton of money trying to figure out how to make it better, but the tl;dr is that at the senior levels, a lot of the promotion committees (it's an anonymous committee, not your manager, who decides) look favorably on managing people. Especially on the manager track, the size of the organization you manage seemed to matter more than how good of a manager you were. In many parts of the org, it became impossible to get the promotion to the next level unless you had a manager who was really good about helping you carve out space to manage a large organization within their org. Career development is mostly an exercise for the reader. There are lots of opportunities available, but you have to go out and find them and push. Don't expect someone to guide you along career development. At the senior levels, you're at a huge disadvantage outside of Mountain View. And if you're in MTV, you're either suffering a huge commute from SF, or living in an extremely overpriced, boring suburb.