Google Software Developer 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.

Great benefits, working at a company everyone respects and says "wow" to, getting to help build the products that really are changing the world. The hours are reasonable, you are treated as a human being and respected as an engineer, and the on-site breakfast lunch and dinner are unmatched anywhere. Luckily google makes their billions using only a small fraction of their total workforce, leaving lots of capital available to dedicate resources to other projects that aren't purely motivated by short-term profits (but rather those that help build press for the organization and are theoretically interesting and innovative at the same time). Tech-talks about a whole range of topics not strictly required for you to carry out your job responsibilities but just for your general education are a huge plus. Google employs some of the most innovative thinkers and builders of our time.