I work at Google. I like it fine. As I pointed out in another comment, these days the gap between Google and say, any moderately well run company is much smaller than it was 15 years ago. Lots of the good things about google, both technical wise and culture wise, has spread throughout the industry.
For almost every amazing 'web scale' tech or developer tool that google has, there is pretty darn good open source equivalents now. Giving employees stock for retention and rewarding high performers is now much more common, as well as snacks and perks and pleasant offices.
Most companies have a more consistent hiring bar to some degree. When I joined the industry in the early 2000s, many companies didn't make candidates code at all, so half your coworkers might be fakers. Now that's a lot less common.
Say what you will about the pros and cons of whiteboard coding, but some coding to have a consistent bar is probably a good thing overall for the industry.
Google still has pretty darn good free food and pays pretty well, and most people who work there are at least fairly smart. It still has plenty of hard problems to solve at scale, which is the most fun part of the job.
However, it's not 2007, where the choices were the fantasy land of Google or Office Space. Now there are a lot of great companies to work for.
For almost every amazing 'web scale' tech or developer tool that google has, there is pretty darn good open source equivalents now. Giving employees stock for retention and rewarding high performers is now much more common, as well as snacks and perks and pleasant offices.
Most companies have a more consistent hiring bar to some degree. When I joined the industry in the early 2000s, many companies didn't make candidates code at all, so half your coworkers might be fakers. Now that's a lot less common.
Say what you will about the pros and cons of whiteboard coding, but some coding to have a consistent bar is probably a good thing overall for the industry.
Google still has pretty darn good free food and pays pretty well, and most people who work there are at least fairly smart. It still has plenty of hard problems to solve at scale, which is the most fun part of the job.
However, it's not 2007, where the choices were the fantasy land of Google or Office Space. Now there are a lot of great companies to work for.