Simply amazing workplace with incredible opportunities
Pros
We work with some of the smartest, most ambitious, and intelligent people around. The problems that we tackle are have great impact worldwide. The work is incredibly challenging and interesting. We're constantly told to think bigger. We really are trying to change the world. We have a great amount of resources at our fingertips. With a couple of commands, I can run a service on thousands of machines worldwide. We have access to pretty much what we need to do our job. Because Google is involved in a large number of industries, there are plenty of opportunities abound to find something that you're interested in. We are highly encouraged to move around the company. The company really takes care of us professionally and personally. The benefits are incredibly high. My team has been on offsites to Tahoe, Vegas, and Hawaii in the last year. The company creates an environment where you don't really want to leave campus. Lastly, being on the inside and seeing all of the technology before it launches is really like seeing the future. Some of the unannounced products that we're working on is science fiction.
Cons
There are many projects that get rejected or shutdown because they aren't Google-scale. Any of these projects that gets rejected would be really successful if it was created by a startup. This also means that the bar for launch is much higher. Google is no longer a startup. It is hard to move fast. We try to balance creating innovative products and a consistent user experience that makes it hard to move quickly as you end up spending a lot of time trying to integrate into existing products. You are working with incredibly intelligent and incredibly ambitious people. This makes the environment a bit competitive and people focused on what gets them ahead.
