Google

Google is where you can put your academic toy grad school projects behind you and build real systems with serious resources behind them.

You work with really sharp coworkers on projects that can impact millions of people all over the world.

If you're self-directed and curious, you'll find no end of interesting problems to work on.

Compensation seems reasonably aggressive in rewarding high performers.

Office layout can be pretty packed (5 engineers to an office hut at times).

Some projects are not as glamorous as other projects.

Perks are on the decline due to the economy (but they're still pretty ridiculous relative to other places).

Spend more time allocating engineers to projects that they want to work on (don't just assign them arbitrarily without their consent).