The CEO decides everything with an iron fist, fires people at whims who were performing well last cycle, will message a level 1 software engineer at 11pm on a Saturday and expect an answer within minutes. He complained that the China team wasn't at their desks at 10pm once. Very little ability to delegate effectively, thinks he needs to be involved in every minor decision which just ends up creating chaos, panic, and anxiety amongst most of the team.
Culture does not reflect the quality of talent they have. The leaders in place from awesome backgrounds are not empowered to actually change or "Lead" they are hired to be yes men for the CEO, and if they try to do anything larger than that they're told to get back to their job of basically IC work.
There's also plenty of extremely grey activities that have been reported on which leaders have explicitly done (do your research / googling). If Google did any of these things, it would be worldwide news with mass employee resignations. They're more interested in "looking good" than actually fixing and building a great culture.
I had a friend there and didn't trust them upon accepting the job. I was unemployed at the time so may not have believed them anyways.
Absolutely the worst environment I've experienced. All 5 star glassdoor ratings are definitely fake or just HR/leaders trying to pump the numbers. I could imagine, at the most, a super kool aid drinker would give maybe 3-4 stars and even that should be a small percentage. Most of my teammates would rank it as about a 2 if they were allowed to speak openly with leadership.
Oh, and their leaders love consultants. If you ever wanted to work amongst a team of nothing but Bain and McKinsey people who have never built anything before but are really good at making powerpoints + internal politicing to make it look like their work matters, this is your place.