If I had a dollar for every superstar wasting away their career at Google, I could by myself a fairly nice BMW 328i.
Pros
Google is the only place I can think of whose majority of employees have a love/hate relationship with it. In a recent survey, most employees said that they were dissatisfied with their career direction/growth and that they were generally unhappy with the scope of their work. At the same time, the vast majority of employees believe in the direction the company is going and believe in senior leadership and would strongly recommend Google as a place to work. Smart enough to know they are capable of so much more and happy enough to not care? Let the good times roll! If you were a fan of 90210, you are almost too old to work there but just young enough to appreciate the 'perks.' Some really super cool people who will hopefully find another really cool place to work and do something great with their lives. BBQ and the other food is ok too For the few who get to work on really cool things that matter, life is good. Highly competitive games of simple conversation.
Cons
Amazingly smart people doing amazing mundane work with limited impact and contribution whilst being fattened up to potentially waste away a great career. Highly competitive atmosphere whereby much of the time creativity is sacrificed. Paraphrasing Page, "We don't need people who can think of new and cool ideas. We have that already. What we need is people who can execute on the ideas we already have." Somehow the hiring process, great as it may be, ends up selecting for a disproportionate number of extremely egotistical a**holes. Low empathy Engineers that border on inhuman "android" like beings not too unfamiliar to those found in a Philip Dick novel where it is asked if they dream of electric sheep. Some do, most do not. But they do dream of self driving, all electric, BMW's. Restricted Areas: not all Google employees are treated equally around campus anymore and access is limited based on what you do for the company and what group you work in. The culture is changing (see Restricted Areas): Google has hired roughly 8-10K people per year for the past ~4 years. I can't think of a company that has a better culture to hold on to but, from what I have seen, they are loosing the battle. Most managers and high potential employees look like they just stepped off the set of 90210.
