Pros: They treat employees very well. Not just by feeding us, but by giving us some degrees of freedom to work on what we want. They pay a lot of attention to employee feedback and actually make changes based on what we say. The technology is amazing, and the people here are as smart as they come. More than likely, the "guy who wrote the book on it" works here.

Cons: It isn't as flexible as it used to be. Career advancement can be difficult if you aren't located in the Mountain View Campus.

Pros: In the past, the company offered a variety of benefits. However, many of these were lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and additional cutbacks were implemented seemingly without rhyme or reason. The compensation was impressive, particularly for those who had been with the company long enough to receive shares valued at less than $1000 before the stock split.

Cons: Even at its prime, Google experienced a high rate of management turnover at all levels. There was a time when I had been with the company longer than the combined tenure of the three levels of management above me, and this trend has only escalated since 2022. The process of rolling out a feature can be quite protracted, often taking months, due to the complex bureaucratic process of Ariane. Upper management occasionally introduces new initiatives with rigid deadlines, seemingly out of the blue. Reorganizations are a frequent occurrence. The caliber of managers varies widely, from exceptional to surprisingly subpar. The performance review processes used to stall company operations for weeks biannually. Although they have since been revised, the execution left much to be desired. Competition for resources and advancement opportunities is intense, leading to unfortunate instances of colleagues undermining each other either for personal gain or out of insecurity. There exist several large-scale systems that have been operational for years, yet no maintainer has a complete understanding even of just their part. Long-term projects are undertaken to rediscover and document this lost knowledge, only to be abandoned or lost due to turnover. A significant portion of engineering effort is directed toward continuous migrations. At one point, technical debt in Cloud had deteriorated so badly that a VP reprimanded the entire organization, and everyone received a badge as a reminder. YouTube's highly compartmentalized structure often overlooks opportunities that span across organizational boundaries. The quality of Chrome code has declined to such an extent that substantial parts need to be completely overhauled. Inter-process communication and memory management are particularly problematic, but performance in general needs attention. Even the Search and Ads departments have not been immune to leadership-related issues.

Pros: Potentially huge impact by working on massively used products. Very rewarding financially and with other benefits.

Cons: Surprisingly incompetent leadership. Culture was once amazing, but is now fake and heartless. So much BS everywhere, incredibly inefficient at a macro scale.