Pros
Google was my dream job for a long time and many people I've talked to in the industry will say the exact same thing to you. Google is such a household name it has become the verb to search for something on the internet. If you're reading this, you likely have some conception of what it means to work for Google and what an amazing experience it is. Google is a fantastic place to work and was, at the peak of my tenure there, hands-down the best job I ever had. To list some of the pros: - Work with genuinely brilliant people, most of whom are genuinely kind, hard-working, and most importantly a joy to work with. - Work on really cool products, offer really cool services, and learn a great deal while supporting them. I genuinely learned more from my experience working at Google than doing anything else in my life I could think of. - Potential to travel and experience amazing new things around the world. These are world-class experiences and you will have a genuinely fun time traveling for work - Free food and unlimited snacks and drinks that are delicious and one of the nicest perks - Each office is beautifully designed and unique making it fun to travel and go to as many as you can - Tons of opportunities to learn and grow your career at Google. Advancement truly seemed limitless and was mostly merit-based (self-advocacy was necessary but it wasn't time-gated to get promoted) - Accepting and open culture in my experience with a good deal of diversity though this varies a great deal by team I'm sure - Pay and benefits are good but not the best in the industry anymore though you get more out of the perks than just your base salary to compensate - Lots of awesome employee-run programs to participate in and socialize with people. These range from support groups for pretty much any demographic to fun stuff like video games and things
Cons
The problem with Google is that despite all of these perks, they come at a price. You slowly but surely (and sometimes not very slowly) have your life consumed by Google. You will love it until you absolutely hate it. There's no work-life balance. Every year at Google, I would hear about ways to improve work-life balance. Things will improve and get worse again. You find yourself starting to look at your email and messages the second you wake up, feeling like you're already behind, and then you work until you sleep feeling like you're way behind. The thing is you're not but there's always more work to do and the company makes sure to hire overachievers whose self-worth is entirely tied to their productivity so you'll feel guilty if you're not constantly producing what feels like the best work you've ever created. Getting into Google is a huge challenge and succeeding at Google is the same way with their performance review cycles. Performance reviews are very necessary to help calibrate and motivate people who are high performers and identify ways to help or resolve issues with under-performers. The problem is that these are all effectively peer-based and this can either help or hurt you depending on your relationship with your peers. You wind up working to improve your ratings rather than improve your work and the process is something that wears down on people more than other places I've seen. Google has tons and tons of internal tools, inside jokes, and other things that are really fun to be a part of but won't benefit you anywhere else outside of Google. If you leave Google, you'll find that you'll need to reteach yourself how to work anywhere else. It's a bit of a tech silo and so you'll find that you advance yourself a great deal in some ways but in others significantly less than you'd expect overall. Everything is org-dependent and team-dependent. If you have a good team at Google, it makes a huge difference. I've heard stories from other Googlers first-hand that are completely different in terms of experience that I've had and, to be honest, every story I've heard adds a new con I never experienced. Management and leadership cares less about you the further up in the chain they are to the point where your job will get erased over an email regardless of productivity or performance. None of them will take accountability despite their claims to the contrary. Google is effectively the same as any other company in terms of how they will treat you if it becomes disadvantageous for them. The company tomorrow and going forward is not what it was in the past and its golden years feel long gone now.