Pros: Obviously, the salary and benefits are incredible. Flexibility in being able to move to new offices or visit offices around the world is incredible. Plugging into a huge, influential machine and working with people from around the world? Amazing.

Cons: Don't expect to do anything significant while working at Google. People are constantly nitpicking each other over irrelevant nonsense during code reviews; there's a very antagonistic culture in a lot of teams (not all). There's also an antagonistic promotion structure: "We have 2 slots for promotion, so even though 3 people earned it, we have to choose 2." Expect to be constantly re-orged. Expect your projects to get cancelled when a new C-suite guy slides in from Microsoft, shakes everything up for no reason, and then slides laterally out into Oracle next year. Get excited for managers who don't want to manage people; they wanted to get promoted and were told they could only do that by taking on direct reports. Get REALLY excited for that. Get stoked for a diminishing culture and ever-decreasing transparency. Bye Google. Hope you figure out your shit.

Pros: Google has plenty of talented engineers, impressive computational infrastructure and resources, and the culture to build products that make big impacts. Working for Google is an ideal starting point for young engineers or new graduates. There are plenty of challenging problems to solve, and you have the flexibility to choose the projects that interest you most. I am not saying that you can give up the current project at any time; it is responsible to finish the projects that were started, but you are encouraged to switch projects every 1 to 2 years, or at least, you can do the "fun" things with your 20% time.

Cons: If you want to be prompted sooner than the majority, and you are not lucky enough to work in a highly visible project, then you have to pay much more than usual to beat the performance of others, because others are good too.

Pros: Amazing compensation and benefits (hard to beat in Seattle). The office space is cozy, and there's lots of autonomy. Taking initiative on important things is heavily rewarded.

Cons: Growing pains as Google has gone from ~10k to ~100k FTE during my tenure. Processes have mostly scaled, but internal trust and culture have not.