Pros: Great benefits: * Free food * Working with competent people * Good work-life balance, at least in the Boulder office * Opportunities to travel for work if that's your thing * A lot of trust among co-workers, which gives you the freedom to make decisions about how to solve problems

Cons: Working in such a huge company can be frustrating, because it's hard to coordinate with other teams that you need to work with. It's also ridiculous how much people will complain about free food. People aren't aware of how privileged they are.

Pros: Google is well known for its perks. In non-COVID times, the offices are well-equipped with all the snacks, food, gyms, massage rooms, and nap pods. It's the stuff of much satire. It's very nice. The compensation is really good. Collaboration across teams can be great, although it does depend on the product area. The culture in the company, and much of the scandal that comes out, is born out of transparency and freedom. Freedom to express yourself is something many employers stomp down on, and sometimes... it's too much, but usually, it's quite freeing.

Cons: The promotion process at Google is well-intentioned but poor, in my opinion. It is honestly probably the single biggest reason Google is known for abandoning products. We develop things for promotions because that's what gets them. Maintaining and improving, or spending the energy to rebuild and transfer data, doesn't get you a promotion. You need to land something, but you also need to excel for over a year. This dissuades people from pushing to do something to try and get a promotion, which is good but also disincentivizing. The whole thing is political. You need to land-grab at times to get work other teams might be doing so they can't do it, again, so you can get promoted. If you land in the right place at the right time, it is easy to move up; "rising tides raise all ships." A bad manager, a bad product idea, can sink you even if you are doing good work.

Pros: * An engineering-first culture * An engineering environment (codebase/tooling/process) * Awesome people * Great products * Get pampered

Cons: As is true for any large organization, there's also a degree of politics, corruption, incompetence, misaligned incentives, etc. It can feel very high pressure at times due to big stakes.