Pros
The food, the food, the food. We are incredibly spoiled on the Mountain View Campus. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. This is a benefit that all humans take advantage of. In addition to this, the other benefits are no industry secret, on campus laundry rooms, lots of gyms, cars on demand in case you have to drive during the day, the list goes on.
Cons
The promotion process is very arduous. It literally costs Google two months of productivity every year for every people manager. It is insanity. As a manager, its very important to prioritize "perf", as you do not want to be the reason your report does not get promoted. This results in two stressful months per year where its very difficult to focus on getting work done. I will say that Google tends to promote the right people - there are very few false positives, there are many false negatives. Not sure this is worse than manager centric review structures where one person controls your destiny, but there are definitely room for improvements. Other big complaint: this place is starting to really limit risk. Emerging and experimental projects are increasingly being canceled in favor of revenue generating projects. Google is no longer the place for experimentation, that happens in other parts of alphabet. Being in the Apps PA, there is a laundry list of B2B features that all apps are being asked to implement. This leaves little room for innovation and creativity, its just about execution. The apps are tools for sales to land cloud and productivity suite contracts.
