Pros: Food, free bikes, free gbuses, free talks, and lectures. A huge campus with a lot to explore, smart people, and fun people as well.

Cons: Google is a huge company, so your project most likely won't have a huge impact. It feels like you are underemployed.

Pros: Salary and benefits are some of the best around. Most departments respect work/life balance. Internal mobility is good. Overall skill level of peers is very high.

Cons: Nothing that happens or has ever happened in software engineering is interesting, relevant, or good unless it happened at Google. Prior experience in "barbarian" companies is considered irrelevant or harmful. Groupthink and NIH syndrome lead to some daft decisions that are considered holy and irrevocable within the company.

Pros: - Great pay and benefits. - Pretty offices with nice perks. - Smart and helpful coworkers. - Work/life balance has so far been pretty good.

Cons: The actual day-to-day is what you would expect as an engineer at any large corporation: * Lots of meetings * Ever-changing requirements * Tremendous amounts of red tape needed to make any changes * An insanely complicated codebase that is full of dead code, outdated dependencies, poorly-documented features, etc. * It's so difficult to find points-of-contact for dependencies that it's encouraged to just "shoot first and ask questions later," with the result that the ecosystem gets even more fragmented * Juggling timezones to connect with overseas teams While this might merit a "meets expectations" at other big corporations, Google so prides itself on its reputation for being innovative, scrappy, etc., that the reality is a tremendous disappointment. Plus, at least at other corporations, you can usually use familiar technologies like VSCode, Git, GitHub, Jira, etc. At Google, you use its own proprietary software for literally everything, which is a major barrier to onramping (and, I imagine, also when people leave Google to start at other firms). As for the famous Google offices and perks — while they are no doubt nice offices, they're still just offices. You go there to work, and then go home. It's not earth-shattering. Being on campus is like being in some weird, sanitized bubble that's disconnected from reality: go to the top floor of one of the ivory-towered Google Cloud buildings, look across the 101, and you can see massive neighborhoods of mobile homes. Google feels like the new Microsoft: overpaid executives playing catch-up to other companies.