Google Software Developer reviews

The food, the quality of your co-workers

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.