Google

Competitive pay, lots of free food and snacks, nap room, in-office perks.

I work in Google Cloud in the Seattle office, and culture is divided. On one side, there are smart people taking smart decisions, but on the other side, there is what I consider a strong white masculine fraternity culture. Sadly, this type of culture comes from people in the buddy-buddy group taking on short, shiny projects, with poor long-term support or design, and many times without understanding of the problem in question. The dedicated smart people will actually try to make these ideas work, but the credit would be taken by someone else, or sometimes with others leaving a big mess, as I have seen several times. In my team, this culture goes two levels deep in management, making senior management unapproachable, and also reflects on the products themselves. There are many visionary type projects, but with broken functionality, or many incomplete solutions for the same goal.

Other than trying to detect this frat-like culture, which is probably one branch of convergence of the review process and invisible in that regard, most of the rankings defined for L6 and L7 (more than senior) do not seem real for people I have worked with. Individuals in this category have not met these criteria from my experience, and I question some of my L6/L7 peers' basic understanding of APIs, services, and management skills. Additionally, there needs to be a much stronger emphasis on data-driven decision-making.