Pros: Great perks. Good pay (at first). Great benefits.

Cons: • Little to no vision from upper management; the company has become increasingly reactive rather than proactive. • Little prospect of career advancement; promos kept getting scarcer and scarcer during the time I worked there. • Compensation shrinks over time, as they don’t give very good raises. • The company has become riddled with bureaucracy and internal politics in the last few years. • I kept hearing from colleagues that the best way to get a promotion or a raise at Google was to leave and come back. • Upper management has pretty much alienated their employees over the past decade, and all their emails about their wonderful ski trips and how we’re all in this together feel really condescending. • Constant reorgs makes your position in any given group shaky at best.

Pros: Good food, good building, good Wi-Fi, good pay.

Cons: Too much pressure, kind of boring to do the same coding.

Pros: Working at Google was a small part of what made working there so great. It was a great day, with awesome people. I get to spend this week with one of my best friends again. We will travel from Colorado to Montana for two events: a youth group camp and an AA meeting in Butte. The night that we were going to drive to Montana, we had a few beers with another girl who we call "T". She's a college friend who lives in Virginia. After work, we met at a local pub (remember the UK-style pub? How times have changed.

Cons: Deming changed how people think about and work on their own projects and how to mentor their teams. Now, those who’ve worked with him say he’s a gentle, creative soul who seeks to help colleagues. In Google’s Building 8, he and his two deputies offer support to engineers as they work on projects that are often wildly speculative. For instance, “we’ve been doing [research on] brain-machine interfaces,” Deming says. “These are like, crazy new ideas.”