Google

• Great pay and benefits.
• Pretty offices with nice perks.
• Smart and helpful coworkers.
• Work/life balance has so far been pretty good.

The actual day-to-day is what you would expect as an engineer at any large corporation:

• Lots of meetings
• Ever-changing requirements
• Tremendous amounts of red tape needed to make any changes
• An insanely complicated codebase that is full of dead code, outdated dependencies, poorly-documented features, etc.
• It's so difficult to find points-of-contact for dependencies that it's encouraged to just "shoot first and ask questions later," with the result that the ecosystem gets even more fragmented
• Juggling timezones to connect with overseas teams

While this might merit a "meets expectations" at other big corporations, Google so prides itself on its reputation for being innovative, scrappy, etc., that the reality is a tremendous disappointment.

Plus, at least at other corporations, you can usually use familiar technologies like VSCode, Git, GitHub, Jira, etc. At Google, you use its own proprietary software for literally everything, which is a major barrier to onramping (and, I imagine, also when people leave Google to start at other firms).

As for the famous Google offices and perks — while they are no doubt nice offices, they're still just offices. You go there to work, and then go home. It's not earth-shattering.

Being on campus is like being in some weird, sanitized bubble that's disconnected from reality: go to the top floor of one of the ivory-towered Google Cloud buildings, look across the 101, and you can see massive neighborhoods of mobile homes.

Google feels like the new Microsoft: overpaid executives playing catch-up to other companies.

Stop hiring overpaid outside executives who try to mimic what other companies are doing.