Google

The people at Google are some of the smartest in the industry. I never questioned the competence of any of my coworkers, ever.

The perks were awesome, not just things like food and massages. There's a variety of awesome classes, workshops, and lectures by famous people. It was like going to college again.

The hiring bar is very slowly lowering.

"20% time" is generally a myth. Internally, we called it "120% time."

Google's increasing scale is causing problems. Some parts of infrastructure are so complex that no one can see the whole picture. Duplicated work and missed requirements happen a lot. As the machine grows larger and there are more parts, the scope of individual responsibility moves further from having real customer impact.

Also, I disagree with the high-level direction of the company. In the last few years, senior management has developed and worsened a trend of killing or crippling beloved products. Strategy is never transparent, even as the company maintains that they value transparency. Overall, it feels that while engineering decisions are data-driven, management decisions are not. There has been a focus on growth at the expense of innovation.

"More wood behind fewer arrows" was a mistake. I fell in love with the Google that made Gmail, but I don't think modern Google could pull it off today.