Google

Incredibly smart and talented engineers.

Great people overall: very passionate about what they do and generally very dedicated to the job and their employer.

Very cool technology at an incredible scale on the infrastructure side. It's a great machinery.

Ability to see all code and work on anything you want, at least as a 20% project.

Working from outside Mountain View can be tough: from late-hour meetings to generally having at least 20% less influence/impact than you'd have if you were in Mountain View, especially on the decision-making side and driving projects.

There's a fair amount of politics and fighting for key projects, with bad coordination between teams working in similar areas.

The occasional suck-up and getting promoted if you're vocal. But I wouldn't say that's the norm, though.

Low salaries compared to the quality of people and hard work done.

High differences in salaries depending on where you came from and how good you were at negotiating them. Very unscrupulous at negotiating everything when it comes to money (from salaries to anything else). Very unscrupulous at using their brand and positive image advantage to the maximum in such negotiations. They treat you like you always have to give something up from your side for the privilege of working with/for them.

Make Google a truly distributed company. Treat employees fairly when it comes to compensation.