Google

Obviously, the salary and benefits are incredible. Flexibility in being able to move to new offices or visit offices around the world is incredible. Plugging into a huge, influential machine and working with people from around the world? Amazing.

Don't expect to do anything significant while working at Google. People are constantly nitpicking each other over irrelevant nonsense during code reviews; there's a very antagonistic culture in a lot of teams (not all).

There's also an antagonistic promotion structure: "We have 2 slots for promotion, so even though 3 people earned it, we have to choose 2."

Expect to be constantly re-orged. Expect your projects to get cancelled when a new C-suite guy slides in from Microsoft, shakes everything up for no reason, and then slides laterally out into Oracle next year.

Get excited for managers who don't want to manage people; they wanted to get promoted and were told they could only do that by taking on direct reports. Get REALLY excited for that.

Get stoked for a diminishing culture and ever-decreasing transparency.

Bye Google. Hope you figure out your shit.

Stop grading everyone based on a strict rubric. Allow your employees to grow into their roles instead of being terrified of stepping out of line for fear of a bad end-of-cycle rating.

You're really losing out on a lot of growth and innovation by forcing people into little tiny boxes.