Google

1. Lots of resources. Computing resources, educational resources, culinary resources, locational resources, people resources, financial resources, etc. You get paid pretty well to boot, even as a SWE or even an EP intern.

2. Lots of high-quality technical infrastructure that you will gasp at if you've spent enough time developing on standard/enterprise software.

3. High-quality technical process and an appreciation for best practices.

4. Amazing networking opportunities. Google interns come from and end up all over the place, so being an intern is a great opportunity to meet lots of different people.

1. Lack of real respect for individuals. This is a symptom of Google being a large company with incredible scope to pick and choose people, along with having many excellent people. You are treated well at the surface level because you were able to get through the interviews and meet the obligatory standards, but you are not treated as an individual outside of your team's breadth. In addition, while you don't see rank explicitly pulled very often, the company is very top-down in policy and culture. I doubt this is a Google-exclusive issue, and in fact it's very common in large companies across the world. It's certainly easier to ignore at Google than other places and you are pampered in a number of ways. If you want that sort of gritty individual respect from the organization, work at a small company.

2. Intern-specific: for full-time conversion, interviews can overshadow contributions to individual host teams. Interns are often left with the decision of maximizing their acquisition of gainful skills and their contributions to the company, or passing up on an opportunity for full-time employment at Google. Interview skills in tech are, at higher levels, focused on things that may not be application-specific for the intern's project, even if they are working on something of significant business value. This is backwards. I can count on one hand the number of tech companies I've heard of that still do this.

Google has had a lot of growing pains into a large company, and that's completely understandable.

It is a big company, and a great big company to work for if the work and culture match your preferences.

However, weighing technical interviews heavily on the backs of interns looking to make a difference for their teams and the company is detrimental to morale and contributions.

The SWE program is still a great opportunity for interns, but Google itself would have a lot to gain if this dogmatic aspect of the culture and process was fixed.