Great company, your mileage will vary
Pros
TGIF - super exciting stuff going on in the company that you have an inside look at every week. Transparency at the level of the executives. (Note - transparency within your own group depends entirely on your manager/director, and may be completely counter to Google's overall level of transparency) CEO - Larry Page back at the helm has been awesome for the company Smart people, some really good at what they do
Cons
High variance in manager competence, including some managers whose only 'skill' appears to have been being lucky enough to join pre-IPO. From my experience - despite massive amounts of 'data', in the form of Googlegeist, employees reaching out to HR to express concerns, and almost universal team dissatisfaction, some really bad managers are simply not dealt with. Really bloated management structure outside of Eng, which means that many people are doing work that is below their level of skill, simply because there are so many layers of management above them. Think the company would actually benefit from a higher turnover rate. Bias against any sort of standardization, even though at the current size of the company, some standardization is needed.