Google

Compensation and perks make for a materially comfortable environment.

Don't believe the glowing reviews. The company may seem fantastic if you're a fresh graduate who's still overawed by free food and on-site laundry.

But once you reach the higher levels, you'll realize that the company has become a cloying, insular, and claustrophobic place.

Internal technology falls further behind the outside world every day, but people still speak and act like they did when Google was years ahead of everyone else.

It's an environment of total hubris.

God help you if you try to rock the boat.

If you do, people snipe at you in design documents, slander your work and your mannerisms behind your back, and undermine you in performance reviews, all the while presenting just enough of a friendly facade to maintain plausible deniability.

Nobody will tell you what's really going on.

Very few people are interested in technical excellence.

The joke is that Google hires the smartest people to "move protos" (i.e., do drudge work) all day.

It took me years to realize that the "move protos" meme resonates because the L7-L9 old-time clique comes down like a fist on anyone trying to do more than make uncreative, incremental, and low-impact changes.

Maybe you don't care about technical excellence.

If you don't, you won't be alone: "merit" and "heroism" are dirty words at Google.

Maybe you want to work your 10-4 job, land a few CLs, eat your free lunch, get your middling performance scores, and collect your above-average paycheck, all the while crusading on memegen or whining about how unfair it is that the company evaluates your performance twice per year.

If that's what you want to do, Google is the place for you.

But if you're the kind of person who wants to advance technology, to apply your intellect to hard problems, and to bring something new into the world, then (unless you get extraordinarily lucky with team placement) Google will suffocate you.

Go anywhere else.

Elevate technical excellence over internal politics.