Pros: The people! Everyone I met was very nice and very smart. World-class tooling and environments. The engineering culture is excellent. Memegen is your friend.

Cons: Base pay isn't as competitive as you might think. They "downlevel" everyone unless you're former FAANG. While they do offer remote, it's not super easy to get remote. Also, my experience joining involved much less swag than I originally expected. That's to say, I never got any Google-branded anything.

Pros: Competitive salary, great benefits. Flexible work hours and a good number of vacation days. Easy to switch roles, teams, and locations.

Cons: A significant chunk of pay (more than 1/3) comes from "equity grants," meaning you only start to get paid until a year after the actual work you've done. Trending towards increased bureaucracy and arbitrary standards for promotion and hiring.

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.