Google

Great work culture. This was my only experience in big tech, so take it with a grain of salt, but I say this from conversations with peers at other big N companies. The atmosphere, flexibility, career prioritization for developers, and the ability to escape bad managers are quite good and unusual.

Benefits. Probably what you hear about all the time, but worth reiterating. The value of the benefits will impact your total comp at Google when directly comparing offers, but in my opinion, it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

Layoffs. Not specific to Google, and the worst is behind us, true, but they continue, just quieter. The standard is high, and when it comes time for management to make a tough decision, employees are stack-ranked. This won't sneak up on you; you can know pretty much how you stack up at any time if you pay attention to available metrics and your conversations with your managers. But it's a risk associated with the high pay, benefits, and career strength of a job at Google.

I very often heard about the culture of collaboration, of random interactions, of the feeling of connection to the work, and being able to build yourself as you also contributed to the company. It's a great ideal, and built into the ethos of Google, but I only ever saw it in decline during my time at Google.

The forced back-to-office policies, the desk sharing, the reduction in food/other benefits, the stack-ranking. While I see how those items, on the company balance sheet, are meaningful costs I'm sure, they are money spent on a good culture. I fear the management will hurt and lose that culture gradually in the pursuit of lowering the "unnecessary" costs bit by bit.