Salary might be high and various perks are nice, though. This depends a lot on the country or office you are in.
You'll find a lot of smart people, computational resources, and great (even if proprietary) tools for everything. The company carries the whole burden of your relocation.
You have the ability to somewhat easily find a different project when you want, and to move to a different team after you have spent 1-1.5 years on your current one. There are also a lot of various projects to choose from.
If you are not a white heterosexual male, you get special attention from recruiters. Numerous internal support and career mentoring resources are also at your disposal, so the company might be a good choice in that case.
Depending on the project and the team, you might feel inefficient or even irrelevant due to projects being huge, old, and slow. Despite all the talks about fighting biases, etc., your future to a high degree depends on your manager, who is often a great engineer but with an upsetting probability might be useless or even detrimental as a manager. Your future also depends more on your ability to demonstrate your work than to actually do something useful, which makes sense. However, the company does not do a nearly good enough job teaching you how to perform such a demonstration in the way it is expected of you. Sometimes, you have to choose between doing something useful for your team or something good for your "career."
Having to stick to all those internal proprietary tools (that are otherwise great to have) makes it hard for you to do much if you leave the company and those tools behind.
You might end up in a team that won't be a good match, or you might get the wrong role due to recruiters making mistakes, and then neither recruiters nor managers caring about fixing them.
HRs pretend to be your friends, but make no mistake—they are not. They only seem to care whether you are a potential issue to the company. If an issue might go away as a result of them bullying you, they might do that, as actually figuring out how to fix internal culture is harder than putting pressure on people.
The company keeps changing internal performance evaluation requirements, disrupting the rhythm of work on a regular basis, probably so someone up high might add "revamped evaluation process," etc., to their own resume at the cost of all the damage to the rest of the company. The CEO, Sundar Pichai, is great at photo ops but otherwise uninspiring. The company's top management pushes American politics onto the rest of the company, even if you are outside of the US. If you do not share radical left-wing American perceptions, either learn to stay silent or start searching for another job.
In 2019, there was a big situation where a bunch of Black employees and their "allies" were harassing a white employee because that employee was, unfortunately outside of work, calling the police after noticing a Black man who acted as a trespasser and who refused to leave. The top management of the company, in a company-wide meeting, "addressed" the situation by pledging their support to the Black employees and said nothing at all that would prevent similar harassments in the future.
I applied for a Google SWE position and went through a recruiter call first. The recruiter was very friendly and clear about the process. My phone screen had two coding questions: * One on arrays (two sum variant) * Another on dynamic programming (u
First, an online assessment, then the HR call, then several rounds of technical interview (you need to solve data structure/algorithm problems), and finally a manager interview (mostly behavioral questions).
HR phone call followed by three technical rounds and a managerial round. Got a message from the recruiter via LinkedIn. I responded that I am interested, and then they scheduled a 15-minute interview to learn about my background and interests.
I applied for a Google SWE position and went through a recruiter call first. The recruiter was very friendly and clear about the process. My phone screen had two coding questions: * One on arrays (two sum variant) * Another on dynamic programming (u
First, an online assessment, then the HR call, then several rounds of technical interview (you need to solve data structure/algorithm problems), and finally a manager interview (mostly behavioral questions).
HR phone call followed by three technical rounds and a managerial round. Got a message from the recruiter via LinkedIn. I responded that I am interested, and then they scheduled a 15-minute interview to learn about my background and interests.