Vantaggi
Competent and mostly helpful colleagues. Extreme amount of information accessible. Very powerful tools. Huge infrastructure for experimenting. Memegen.
Svantaggi
Cult of growth. Everything is measured, quantified and evaluated in terms of growth and impact. Exponential growth is expected in every single metric: number of projects, number of users, lines of code, impact, whatever. If something stops growing, it usually gets killed. Do you remember Google Reader? It stopped growing. Look out for your own stats, and get transferred quickly if you stop growing at your current place. Lack of focus. Hyperactive and very disruptive development in most areas, with user experience neglected. It is starting to hit back (as of 2014-2015). Unfortunately, I can't go into details on the consequences of this one, due to confidentiality. Chaos. There is no stable point, everything changes all the time. All documentation is unfinished and/or outdated. Very few people have the 'big picture' and they don't have time to share it, because they have to chase their own growth. Reorganization is continually happening. People come and go, teams come and go, products come and go. Usually we move 3-4 times a year. Noogler onboarding is often forgotten. There's a story about a noogler haunting the buildings for 2 months before finding out whom he reported to. I'm not sure if that ever happened, but I've seen people wandering around for several days. (Now I have the routine to spot them and help finding their team.) Long working hours and stress. This is most prevalent in SRE, but many development teams experience it, too. Cult vocabulary. There are hundreds of words for common things. On top of that, all projects have their internal codenames, and sometimes 3-4 different names refer to the same thing. You can speak whole sentences with words that only googlers understand. Willpower, Ikea, magnet, batman, etc.: those words do not mean what you think they mean. Location-specific issues. The company is centered around Mountain View, and you are almost certainly required to move there if you become important. Other sites (especially non-US sites) provide significantly less perks and choices. Mountain View is extremely crowded, and facilities can't keep up with the growth. Property prices are crazily inflated by googlers, and traffic is bad for the same reason. London still has some office space, but it pays much less than other sites, while living costs are the same or higher. The company sets the salaries based purely on industry average, not on living costs. The London benchmark seems to be flawed. You can't afford to rent any decent flat near the office, and commute is awful during peak times. Offices are open plan everywhere. Waiting for male toilets is very common at most sites. With regards to quality of life, the Zurich site is the most livable in Europe, and maybe New York in the US (until Eric Schmidt applies his stupid crowdedness-makes-you-creative theory).