Pros: - Great salary - Great benefits - Generally competent engineers - Culture of helpfulness and quality in many engineering teams. Most engineers will answer your email and give you advice. - Can still find interesting technical work, though there's lots of dull work too, especially if you're more junior.

Cons: PR-speak is widespread. Executives use a vague, CYA communication style. To me, it's like hearing politicians talk. Transparency has been steadily going down for years; you hear about projects when they're announced or leaked. Several high-level execs seem to have a pretty weak ethical compass. There's an increasing number of ethical scandals and antitrust fines, etc. The internal explanation is often weak and unconvincing around these issues. Lots of talk of being data-driven, but what's common is data being used to justify whatever fits the data slinger's narrative, including for myopic goal setting that results in adverse second and third-order effects (see Goodhart's Law). There's an increasing attitude of engineers just doing whatever they're told, forgetting the "do the right thing" of old times. Project and product churn. Google products are often unfinished and buggy, UIs changing all the time. Lots of talk of rewarding product excellence, but lots of cynicism about it (I don't buy it; I don't see the products getting better). Product managers compete to launch features; engineers have increasingly less power to make product decisions. If you're more senior, you might get pushed to do management. The old days of having a technical individual career option seem over in many teams, at least if you want to get promoted. Internal frameworks tend to be overengineered and complex because of many disparate use cases and legacy. Easy things take a long time as a result. Critical internal tools can be unstaffed while projects that go nowhere (how many chat apps?) can have massive headcount. Crowded, noisy open-floor offices with little privacy. I heard some folks outside engineering don't even get a fixed desk anymore. AI seems much more important than privacy. Products and strategy seem aligned with getting Google more and more data. There are privacy-unfriendly defaults, UIs, etc. This might make you uncomfortable if you work on a consumer product.

Pros: Liberty to do side projects after completion of your own project.

Cons: Food is getting worse and worse.

Pros: It's a good place to work.

Cons: Sometimes very top-down hierarchy.