Still an amazing place to work, beware of entitlement
Pros
1. Great work/life balance. There's not many companies I know that have a consistent a 40hr work week, and pay top salary. 2. Cool projects to work on. Good balance between research & development. (See caveats below though.) 3. Supportive, healthy, psychologically safe work environment. Google cares a ton about how we work, and how we work together. The bottom-up culture also means that we have a lot of self-determination and don't feel like we're at the mercy of our management. 4. Super easy internal mobility. Lots of us change teams every couple of years. Google has so many different types of work that you won't feel you're "stuck" -- as long as you like working at Google overall, then you'll be able to find something interesting. 5. It's Google! Having Google on your resume opens doors to other opportunities, and it's great for networking too since generally your colleagues will be top of their field.
Cons
1. Entitlement. I make literally 5x as much as I ever dreamt. The comp is insane at FAANG companies like Google. But people here constantly complain about salary, the quality of the free food, why they have to work 5 days a week.... these are sometimes the same people who work 20 hrs a week. The amount of entitlement is insane here -- yes, we're the best of the best and we deserve a lot. But the culture and perks tend to pamper us. 2. Not all teams and projects have fulfilling work. There's lots of options, but choose carefully. Maybe you're happy getting paid to do nothing, on a team that has no visibility, so that you can "rest and vest" and coast. But, this will leave you woefully unprepared for your next job.... any company will hire you after Google, but that doesn't mean you'll do well at any company, particularly if you go to a more fast paced environment.
