Pros: - In Switzerland, the money is good. - Contrary to earlier reviews, work/life balance has actually been fixed and is fine now. - Likewise, middle management has been fixed and is generally pretty good now. - You will work with a lot of really, really smart people and you will learn so, so much. - People in engineering get a lot of freedom to work on their own side-projects, travel, publish, work on open-source, and so on. - Everyone means well pretty much all the time. It is rare for people to be underhanded or obviously self-serving.

Cons: Most people are super smart, but many of them lack even basic social skills, and they will drive you up the wall. Google is a really good large company, but it is a large company. Creeping bureaucracy and attempts at making everything more corporate are a daily theme and, if left unchecked, will eventually destroy the culture. People retention measured in decades has its downsides. Because Google has been so successful, the old-timers see little reason to adopt engineering practices of the 21st century, and Google is slowly but surely slipping further and further behind the industry in tools and programming practices. God damned open office plans! The scourge of tech companies. Google is one of the worst offenders.

Pros: Incredibly smart and talented engineers. Great people overall: very passionate about what they do and generally very dedicated to the job and their employer. Very cool technology at an incredible scale on the infrastructure side. It's a great machinery. Ability to see all code and work on anything you want, at least as a 20% project.

Cons: Working from outside Mountain View can be tough: from late-hour meetings to generally having at least 20% less influence/impact than you'd have if you were in Mountain View, especially on the decision-making side and driving projects. There's a fair amount of politics and fighting for key projects, with bad coordination between teams working in similar areas. The occasional suck-up and getting promoted if you're vocal. But I wouldn't say that's the norm, though. Low salaries compared to the quality of people and hard work done. High differences in salaries depending on where you came from and how good you were at negotiating them. Very unscrupulous at negotiating everything when it comes to money (from salaries to anything else). Very unscrupulous at using their brand and positive image advantage to the maximum in such negotiations. They treat you like you always have to give something up from your side for the privilege of working with/for them.

Pros: The environment is exciting and fun, with great colleagues and very fun offices. The problems I have tackled so far are challenging, hard, and fun. It's great to feel you are solving a unique problem at a huge scale.

Cons: There are a lot of processes to follow when deploying something.