Glass ceiling unless you have political allegiances in there
Pros
Comfortable office, free food, discounted massage, fun quarterly parties, good business trips and offsites abroad if you are lucky. Great as a starter job in your 20s.
Cons
Lots of people in there stuck at L4 and below roles. Core work very boring, repetitive and unchallenging. Expected to create projects for no reason that are often ignored and not implemented unless you go through many internal stakeholders and they all like you! Lots of brown-nosing required to get promoted. Google forces a competitive environment in terms of its bell curve performance review practices which means even if you work extremely hard, if it's regarded as a smidgen less than a colleague you could end up at the bottom of the pile and on a written warning. Having a work laptop is a major con as its implicit you should almost always be working, thinking, breathing Google at all times. Since going to a smaller company I can see how demanding and stressful Google were for many years and how I should have left sooner.
