Pros: Different tasks: * Quick data manipulations with Python, MapReduce (or SQL) * Creating and analyzing online experiments or offline side-by-side experiments * Changing search runtime C++ code * Creating tools for supporting other teams Profit from your work is all that matters (note it can also be bad). Good documentation and search over it. Many tools for common use, development (e.g., maintaining your virtual machine or service server), and analytics are in the form of a website. Almost anything is already implemented; all code is in one repository (even frontend). No team branches. No merge hell.

Cons: It would require much time, probably one year, to quickly solve tasks with no one's help. When there are no important tasks, you would still receive something from the backlog. In order to have high profit from your work, you have to sense those situations and create tasks for yourself.

Pros: Lots and lots of pros to the job.

Cons: No cons to think of.

Pros: Great specialists, some unique technologies to work with, like YT. Nice perks and office.

Cons: See advice to Management. There are some projects that compete with each other and some well-known and popular solutions. This leads to disambiguation on what tools you should use. Sometimes you just don't know what "the way we do X" is, because there are several ways, each having some support from devtools folks. Nobody knows which support will be dropped in the future and which will not.