Google reviews

Your colleagues are smart, motivated, inventive, and helpful. If you work on the right teams, you can pick up a ton of useful knowledge in a short period of time from world-class experts. The company is attacking plenty of exciting technical problems: machine translation, huge distributed systems, creating smooth AJAX UIs, large-scale machine learning in search & ads, creating a mobile phone OS from the ground up. Again, depends on what team you're on, but there's no excuse to be bored with the technical challenges. Parts of the company (e.g., Chrome, Android, mobile apps like Latitude) are blazing new ground and still feel like a start-up; in those areas, there are opportunities for entrepreneurial engineers to make a big impact (although this can be a struggle). Food is excellent.

I've also heard about how Google's stack ranking-based review system is obsolete and is an unfair way to rate employees. I suspect that most of the people who complain fall on the low end of the review scale. Personally, I have never paid much attention to the review process, and I have never felt unfairly treated by it. I am also one of those people who delights in knowing that there is always someone smarter than me at Google that I can learn from. Since I'm always learning from someone, I'm always improving, and always holding my own in the stack rankings. Google does not and should not reward complacency. While I'm sure the review process can be improved, I've also witnessed that it has been slowly evolving for years so I'm content that people are working to improve the process.