Still good place to work, not exceptional anymore.
Pros
- Good benefits - Good pay overall for a software engineer, but pay last few years starting to stagnate compared to other Big Tech. I would not say Google pays very top of market anymore, despite what they would claim. - Internal software development stack is generally pretty good, with some exceptions. - Lot's of innovative and interesting projects still going on, despite the size if the company. You just need to find the right group to work with and it can be great, find the wrong one and it can be boring and have dysfunctional culture dynamics going on.
Cons
- The culture from up top as changed dramatically, Google's leadership has dropped the ball in terms of company culture for many years now and they simply don't care about fixing it. It certainly could be much worse, there are plenty of places to work with more dysfunctional and terrible cultures, but the magical awesome culture Google was known for from top to bottom is dead and has been dead for a long time. And it's clear leadership considers this a feature, not a bug. - Promotions outside of Senior have gotten much harder as Google as focused on belt-tightening. It's becoming much harder to be recognized and pay raises are not as good as they use to be. Not bad, but they are no longer paying very top of market, unless of course you have some special skills with AI (PhD, worked at an well-known AI start-up, etc.). - Lot's of legacy systems and code to deal with, of wide varying quality. Pretty standard stuff considering the age of the company, but you need to be comfortable learning about really old systems that have gotten crufty over time. And expect a hard time getting the time & resources to make the improvements that really are necessary.
