- Google is a big company. So there are going to be winners and losers when it comes to career growth. Due to the high hiring bar, most people who don't win are smart people as well and their experience sours. This place is optimized to avoid false positives in every step and false negatives are inevitable. At least when you get promoted, you can feel good that you have truly done something.
- You have to have skill to find impactful areas or projects or start one in order to grow fast. A lot of people can't or don't want to do that. They want it lying there in a platter in front of them (I don't mean this disrespectfully. I have been there). This is why smaller companies or startups look attractive. It's easier to grow in a less competitive place and there is nothing wrong in wanting that.
In my experience, a lot of people who say Google is boring and young & smaller companies are those that are good at building things and solving problems that a thousand other engineers can solve. They just want a place where it hasn't been solved. At google, a lot of your basic services and infra are built. So the problems to solve get substantially more difficult and requires some lateral thinking as well. Again, no disrespect. There are lot of people out there, including me, who would like interesting problems handed over to us.
- in a place of this size, you have to navigate some political issues.
- in critical systems like search, you can just push new things (rightfully so). It's a process and you have to convince that your feature can be used by a billion people. I'm sure every company would do this.
