Great perks, but they own you and it's driving the entrepreneurial types away
Pros
Google hires very smart people and allows them to participate in the culture. This means your coworkers will likely be very interesting and fun, and you'll probably enjoy the office environment immensely. You'll learn a lot. The hours are very flexible and the company takes the notion of work-life balance as it applies to the workday very seriously (though there's a dark reason for this). And the perks are second to none. Compensation is also quite competitive as you rise through the ranks. And the food! I still dream about the food. It's a great place to build a stable career if you love coding but aren't super-entrepreneurial and don't make tons of contributions to open source projects (see the cons for why these would be issues). The workplace environment is often replicated, but nobody else has matched it yet.
Cons
The cons are flipped versions of the pros: Google hires very smart people and then puts them in fairly mundane roles. They used to try to take your preferences into account when allocating; they seem to do much less of this as they've grown. If you're at all purpose-driven, you'll eventually become restless at work, looking for something with more meaning than the project you're on. You could potentially 20% something, but that notion has always applied more to some groups than others, and the company has tended to downplay it in recent years. More disturbingly, there's a severe opportunity cost to your side projects: their position is that everything that you do in your personal time belongs to them, although that is not what the employment agreement says and would be an unenforceable position in California. They instead get around this by suggesting that everything that touches the web or mobile (and perhaps the desktop as well) is competitive with them. There's a committee that will examine ideas, but it appears to be moribund. Google has grown tremendously, and systematized to the point where it's a large machine, needing an increasing number of cogs to keep the engine running. The culture has been eroding recently because the company hasn't been able to reconcile it with its growth, and because the company has sidetracked from its core mission and thrown resources at "me-too" projects such as Google+. I predict that this will hurt the company's outlook in the long term, as most of its revenue generation still comes from relatively few core activities which are exposed to market and competitive risks. As it becomes less entrepreneurial, it becomes less able to diversify into new areas, and thus becomes less resilient. I would expect this to take 5-10 years to become apparent (the market would need to shift in a way that causes one of their pillars to collapse), which means that it may not be an issue for most people considering it now. One other thing I've found is that while they care collectively about their engineers a great deal, they're generally not very willing to go out on a limb to make individuals happy. Food and facilities people are the exception, as they do often take engineers' feedback into account.
