Fantastic and infuriating at once: like some of the best love affairs...
Pros
The quality of the people and the ambitiousness of what we're doing is quite something. I've seen a lot of other companies from the outside, as a former strategy consultant, and Google's more extraordinary than a lot of those on the inside realise. The culture's very transparent (though that may reflect function / geography) and impressively flat. Which isn't to say there aren't title and salary differences, but that fantastic people with lowly titles are given the space and encouragement to do fantastic things.
Cons
As the organisation grows, the 'flatness' of it makes it pretty exhausting: there are too many other people and functions to deal with, and very little opportunity to delegate responsibility. A corollary of is that you're valued and recognised in proportion to how you're viewed by those many other people, which favours those who're noisiest. Self-promotion and internal marketing for yourself and your projects is (usually) something you need to take time over if you're going to do well here, and that's a pity because it's mostly unproductive - in the sense that the company or the projects don't improve much for you shouting about them.
