Comfortable place to start a career, but can't take much with you when you leave
Pros
-The perks are of course the best thing about working here (food, gym, on-site laundry, 401k matching, etc, etc). That it's the first thing mentioned is kind of analogous to people first mentioning "good weather" when talking about the pros California. -Author talks at Google are good opportunities to meet authors, and offer nice perspectives from outside the tech bubble. I need to take advantage of this more. -Engineering culture. I've worked at places before that treated engineers as more of a means to an end, instead of involving them more in the process. Nice role reversal here, though it probably still needs some balance. -Looks good on your resume -Good place to start your career, though be careful because you can't take much with you (or you will want to recreate tech on the outside when you get out). -20% time still exists (depends on the team) -work-life balance (depends on the team) -Can become too comfortable and insular and not challenging, which can hurt your career later on. Don't get too comfortable or you'll get trapped here.
Cons
-Coworkers talk about the food endlessly, like it's the best and central part of their day. Because it is. -Lots of NIH and Google-specific libraries which folks can't take with them when they leave. The outside world operates very differently and with different technologies, and people won't learn much of that here unfortunately. -Lack of freedom to choose technologies. A lot of solutions exist on the outside, but there's often a homegrown competitor that we're forced to use, so it will make that other team look good (lots of folks write libraries and services just to get promoted). -No Node.js support in production. This is especially painful for aqui-hires because many startups these days use Node. Then they find they need to re-write everything to integrate with Google. -Checkin + code review process is super bloated, anal retentive, and obsessive. This slows down development time considerably. This is especially painful for aqui-hires, where no one on the team has readability, so you have to make friends within Google just to get your code checked in. Really, really frustrating and the feeling that productivity has gone down immensely. -Still not a good environment for frontend engineers. If you even hint that you like JavaScript and CSS, people will look at you like you have brain damage. Not a lot of the engineering culture values FE work, although that's a self-admitted problem that they're trying to change. -Fiscal irresponsibility. Hiring rate within the last few years has been out of control and unsustainable. There is a boom time now, but this is going to hurt and result in many layoffs when the next crash happens. -Engineering culture (also listed as a pro above). Specifically non-frontend engineering. This is reflected in the ridiculous interview process. It would be good to get more diversity of thought and perspectives, not just a hard-line engineering perspective. So many decisions are based on quantitative data alone, which is a mistake if a company wants to push the boundaries and wants to be innovative. -Entitlement and elitism. It's not everyone of course. -High cost of living around main campus. You may think you're getting paid a lot, but the cost of living in the area matches that salary.
