Google

Google is one of the first places I've worked where I feel like I'm surrounded by people that are way smarter than I am. This makes for a really creative environment, where everyone is pushing you to go beyond your limits and make something even better. It also means that you can just trust that everyone around you is really good at what they do.

There's also a huge focus on only launching things when they're ready, which, as an engineer, means when something does launch, you're really proud of it, and don't feel like it's half-assed because you were rushing to a deadline and cut a lot of corners.

Oh, and the free food and benefits rock, but they wouldn't keep me at any job if I didn't enjoy the work and the people. But when you do like the job and the people, they make it that much better :)

Google is getting big. This means a couple of things:

• It's no longer always a "startup" feel.
• There are a lot of teams and a lot of infrastructure.
• There's starting to be a bit of bureaucracy here and there (though management has done a pretty good job killing it on sight whenever they see it).

Also, because we have a lot of users and are always in the limelight, we have to be really careful about launching things. This often means that launching something requires jumping through more hoops to make sure it's scalable and stable, and that all the i's are dotted and t's are crossed, in order to avoid a bad press situation or an emergency caused by an overloaded system.

This is good for production launches, but can slow down experimentation in the early stages of a product.

Keep doing what you're doing.