Google

Pay is around the top of what you can get in big tech.

Google still has most of the perks it's famous for: solid food, entertainment options, gyms, and interesting shared spaces.

The work is generally challenging – solving difficult problems at scale – but not super intense. You rarely have to work longer than 40 hours/week if you are good at setting your expectations.

Anyone who has been there since the mid-2010s or longer is likely to be a super smart, super kind person who is competent and a pleasure to work with.

It increasingly feels like other big tech companies. The bottom-up, dev-focused mentality still exists to some extent, but bureaucracy, mandates, and managerial office politics are all getting more prevalent. Leadership decisions are increasingly opaque and crassly unconcerned with employee opinions.

Hiring standards have plummeted with the rapid expansion starting in the late 2010s. Combined with the widely available materials and coaching for passing Google interviews, this has led to a lot more incompetent people getting into the company at all levels.

The company is agonizingly slow to fire people for performance reasons. This means if you have teammates, reports, or (worse) managers who are incompetent, they could linger in their positions for a year or years being minimally productive—or even actively counterproductive—before they are let go.

You'd often think the company was struggling to make ends meet, rather than profiting tens of billions of dollars per year. Perks are being suspended or cut, mass layoffs occurred without warning, and the already haphazard hiring pipeline has been frozen on and off. Upper management maintains that this is all the result of economic headwinds and long-term strategy, versus propping up the wealth of the major shareholders.