Google

• In Switzerland, the money is good.
• Contrary to earlier reviews, work/life balance has actually been fixed and is fine now.
• Likewise, middle management has been fixed and is generally pretty good now.
• You will work with a lot of really, really smart people and you will learn so, so much.
• People in engineering get a lot of freedom to work on their own side-projects, travel, publish, work on open-source, and so on.
• Everyone means well pretty much all the time. It is rare for people to be underhanded or obviously self-serving.

Most people are super smart, but many of them lack even basic social skills, and they will drive you up the wall.

Google is a really good large company, but it is a large company. Creeping bureaucracy and attempts at making everything more corporate are a daily theme and, if left unchecked, will eventually destroy the culture.

People retention measured in decades has its downsides. Because Google has been so successful, the old-timers see little reason to adopt engineering practices of the 21st century, and Google is slowly but surely slipping further and further behind the industry in tools and programming practices.

God damned open office plans! The scourge of tech companies. Google is one of the worst offenders.

PLEASE, for goodness's sake, let people use stuff invented after 1990. Otherwise, Google will become one of the companies we laugh at that still write COBOL in 2015.

No, Go doesn't count: it's basically a nicer C.