Pros
- Great WLB for most teams (except for Google Cloud) - Great salary and benefits - Have the ability to ship features that millions will use - Invests in junior developers - If you get bored, there are many teams to switch to if you live in a major tech hub
Cons
- Your experience can be very team dependent - Hard to get promoted past L4/L5. You have to constantly prove your work has "impact". This is difficult if your team does not work on something "impactful". There is some politics involved here. - Increasing layoffs and fear about layoffs - Focus on AI means other projects and teams lose resources - Classic big company bureaucracy - Anything you want to do needs a document (doc). Need to develop a feature: design doc (makes sense). But wait, before you write that doc, you need a doc about the doc (Huh?). But now there are too many docs, you need a doc that summarizes both the docs and links to both docs. Obviously I'm exaggerating but you will spend more time writing docs that nobody will read than writing the actual 50 line code change. - Engineers can be incentivized to make needlessly complex implementations of features because it makes them look smarter - More stringent about hybrid work (tracking badge ins to the office) - Google getting involved in politics and military contracts (Project Nimbus) - Google stopped DEI initiatives
