Google

Google is well known for its perks. In non-COVID times, the offices are well-equipped with all the snacks, food, gyms, massage rooms, and nap pods. It's the stuff of much satire. It's very nice.

The compensation is really good. Collaboration across teams can be great, although it does depend on the product area. The culture in the company, and much of the scandal that comes out, is born out of transparency and freedom. Freedom to express yourself is something many employers stomp down on, and sometimes... it's too much, but usually, it's quite freeing.

The promotion process at Google is well-intentioned but poor, in my opinion. It is honestly probably the single biggest reason Google is known for abandoning products.

We develop things for promotions because that's what gets them. Maintaining and improving, or spending the energy to rebuild and transfer data, doesn't get you a promotion.

You need to land something, but you also need to excel for over a year. This dissuades people from pushing to do something to try and get a promotion, which is good but also disincentivizing.

The whole thing is political. You need to land-grab at times to get work other teams might be doing so they can't do it, again, so you can get promoted. If you land in the right place at the right time, it is easy to move up; "rising tides raise all ships." A bad manager, a bad product idea, can sink you even if you are doing good work.

Fix perf/promo.