Google

In my experience, Google is an awesome place to work if:

• You get intrinsic enjoyment from writing code, even when asked to spend months coding something for reasons that are unclear or less than inspiring (like lack of planning, inter-group politics, inertia, etc.).
• You like reading code, doing code reviews, and having access to the entire source code of most Google products.
• You plan to work here for at least several years and like the idea of spending your first 3 to 6 months getting familiar with the large number of Google-only systems, tools, libraries, and coding practices that must be known even before doing small internal projects, even though this knowledge will be mostly irrelevant outside of Google.
• If forced to choose, you would prefer a high salary, incredible benefits, and job stability more than working on projects you care about.

There are relatively few pros that survived my first 2 months here and that I'll miss when I leave. These are:

• You are surrounded by smart, interesting people, many of whom are new to the area and looking to make friends.
• Some really awesome internally-built tools for writing code, doing code reviews, building dashboards, etc.

Disclaimer: Google is the most decentralized company I've worked for in the degree to which different groups and projects have their own work intensity, culture, ambitiousness, manager quality, etc. A lot of people I know love working here, feel they are working on interesting/important projects, and are full of respect for their colleagues and leadership.

My experience, unfortunately, has been almost entirely negative:

• problems start with the hiring process because they put up vaguely described job openings, don't tell you almost anything about what you'll be working on during the interview, and then don't make any attempt to match you to projects you might care about or have experience with. The implied message is - you made it to Google, so you're smart enough to learn new technology, languages, and skills as needed, and we give you so much that you should be happy working on anything.

After working here for several months, my impression was:

• self-satisfaction, detachment/cluelessness/apathy and arrogance are prevalent, including at the very top.
• too many of the company's core slogans frequently don't reflect reality:
  • treating employees with respect - actually condescension disguised as benevolence
  • caring about users - actually often dismissing them as a nuisance or too stupid to use the product correctly.
  • setting goals that are so ambitious that you fail on some - actually often failing on un-ambitious goals for non-respectable reasons
  • openness in communicating with employees - actually, most communications end up being empty hype and ass-kissing.
  • maximise efficiency and productivity - actually, even simple web front ends require constant battles against unrelated problems with unreasonably slow or broken internal APIs, overly slow build/test/deploy tools, lack of documentation for how to use internal systems, etc.
  • fast-paced entrepreneurial culture - actually, for too many people, the main objective is to look good and score points with their manager - this is true all the way up to the VPs that report to Larry
  • hire the best people - almost everybody here is really smart, but the culture often brings out the worst, most unprofessional side of people
  • taking risks and changing the world - the level of risk I see people taking is changing the location of a UI button on an internal tool without talking to the product manager first.

From what I saw while working on internal tools, it seems for too many managers, their highest aspiration is to keep employees occupied and to avoid looking bad in front of superiors. Other things besides this don't matter as much – not even user complaints (unless/until superiors start caring).

Put another way, I was disappointed by the lack of idealism and purpose, by the excessive careerism and politics, and by the us vs. them mentality between different engineering groups and between engineers and users.