Pros: Work-life balance Awesome peers

Cons: Slow growth in some teams

Pros: Exposure to a lot of new technologies.

Cons: Some bureaucracy stops you from creating, innovating.

Pros: - Highly competitive pay, best benefits I've seen, best perks I've seen (yes, this doesn't matter, but when everything else is good, this helps). - Very strong individuals. The average engineer here is very skilled, and some of the best in the industry are here. This does not mean everyone is a genius, but there are certainly some here. To do the work, you definitely don't need to be the best, but the quality here is definitely among the best I've seen (I've worked at other "top" companies). - Stellar work-life balance. I've seen reviews for this that are negative, but I feel like they're on the wrong team or something. My team was busier than most and promoted people quickly, and I still rarely pushed over 40 hours a week. I've seen some people work significantly fewer hours as well and still progress. You can coast at L4 if you just do basic work and rest and vest. - Good projects if you're on the right team. If you get lucky and get on the right team, then the work is definitely interesting. This can be a con if you are on the wrong team. - Interesting tools and learning opportunities. You can definitely learn a lot about system architecture if you are new to it. You can learn about any product area and go into the little details of that domain. Some tools at Google are used elsewhere, and the knowledge can be transferred (Guice, Bazel, gRPC, protos, etc.).

Cons: - Work does not translate to other jobs. You never get to work on stuff like Apache Spark, AWS S3, RabbitMQ, and other technologies that are very common in industry. Instead, you learn things like BigTable, which is similar to Apache HBase but not exactly. Your knowledge of internal frameworks is mostly useless in other jobs. The concepts learned are not, however. - Half the projects are objectively boring and stale. Most of the projects involve maintaining some aspect of the system (cloud, ads, etc.), and a lot of it is tedious infrastructure work. - Office politics as usual. The general population is friendly, but this does not mean everyone. Office politics definitely do play a role.