Google

The pay is very good. Very high year-on-year raises and bonuses, very lucrative stock shares.

Depending on your team/product, it's possible to work on very high-visibility projects that look great on a resume.

Lots of experience "working at scale" as per Google's favorite talking point.

It's true that most people you work with are really very smart, motivated, and proactive.

The company is moving in a direction that gives individual employees less and less freedom and judgment to do their jobs. The Google logic is: if we want people to start/stop doing something, we invest money into enforcing it. This applies to everything from minor coding style to attendance and parking. Infringements of all kinds can result in a pay cut.

The attendance policy uses your IP address to detect whether you're working from home or somewhere further away. Meeting rooms track faces and will send you an email if not in your assigned meeting room 15 minutes into the meeting. Managers have a dashboard to see daily badge-ins.

Very strong emphasis on hierarchy and individual ownership. Little emphasis on teams. Engineers are incentivized to "own" things and supervise others rather than to collaborate and help each other.

Google is very old-fashioned in the way they do things. They live on not only a "tech island" but also a "process island." They are very invested in "waterfall" development style, which favors writing a formal document before making any small code change, and then throwing it over the wall to a junior engineer to implement. Engineers aren't really encouraged to (or given time to) read and learn from sources outside of Google, so most engineers aren't aware of alternatives to or reasoning behind "the Google way."

Extremely conservative leveling and promotions. Promotions are highly political and depend heavily on your manager's motivation and presentation skills, which does not always feel very fair. You're typically pushed to operate at "L+1" for a year or more before you would be granted a promotion due to arbitrary requirements.

Little support for junior developers. At lower levels, it can be really difficult to get assigned "L+1" projects which will allow you to be promoted. In my experience with multiple teams, it's very common for junior engineers to be isolated from the rest of the team, only getting passdowns from the engineer "supervising" their work and little exposure to the rest of the team. People tend to take contributions from lower-level engineers less seriously, solely based on their level, which means more friction to get your job done.

As much as Google touts their "fun" spaces and their anti-micromanagement philosophy, in practice, you get assigned way too much work to be able to make use of this. There is no time to learn and grow on your own. In all the years that I've worked for Google, I can count the number of conversations I've had with co-workers on two hands (and I'm a pretty social person). It's really not a people-centric company at all anymore.

I have no advice for management, who are just foot-soldiers of short-term share value. The advice I have is to my fellow software engineers: This company doesn't care about you or employee experience. Don't take the weekly surveys, don't bother attending the TGIFs, your voice is not important to them no matter what they say. Just take your paycheck and go home at the end of the day. Or work somewhere else.