Pros
- Google benefits, Google-affiliation - The experience you have here will tear you apart so much, it pretty much prepares for all other adversity/meanness you can imagine. Three cheers to being ripped apart and having paid for God-knows-what-sins. - Having your eyes opened to just about how clique-y, malicious a culture can get. Just look at all the obviously fake reviews pushed out here by their recruiting team. Cookie-cutter, "all is great and I am in heaven" posts here that hide the emotional and psychological trauma that top-performing employees went through before jumping ship to google, after being berated and abused like never before.
Cons
- Oh well, an experience that prepares you for the worst in life. Abusive environment that gets you psychologically strong. What's not to like? All the better if you've been a star performer all your life academically/professionally - this place will tear you down in as little as six months. Be prepared for semi-deserving "tech leads" and "managers" to show you are a not-so-valuable employee who churns out dirt. After all, that's what Steve Jobs did to the folks he worked with too, no? So isn't it great that you are getting a taste of that? Watching semi-competent fully-arrogant pre-acquisition insiders get promoted while you slog away and build products for them and still get slammed for not being good enough. And then you go to Google and recalibrate yourself, going through PTSD for a year or two before you realize you were really fine, and get a sense of what a "normal" work environment feels like.