Adversarial, combative intra-organizational dysfunction
Pros
Pay is good, benefits are almost as good as Microsoft, but have been cut in recent years. Advancement up to L5 is fairly straightforward, although actual advancement is dependent on your team's ability to secure work that is viewed as impactful, and of your management's ability to represent you.
Cons
Particularly in Cloud, there are many layers of dysfunctional management that are forever locked in combat with each other to build their own empires within Google. Work priorities change frequently and drastically. SREs are increasingly taking on more operational toil and no priority is given to fixing systemic causes of toil or issues. All decisions below director level are made based on how much impact can be demonstrated within a myopic performance evaluation system. Work-life balance is explicitly no longer a concern.
