Pros
Take away everything else, and the reason to work at Google is the people. I've learned more here than I have anywhere else, and everyone I've worked with has been mutually interested in improving each other. Being able to attend engineering talks by people all over the organization (and world) is a hugely enriching experience. Beyond that, all the perks are great: - Opportunity to make changes that affect huge numbers of users - Employees are judged by their contributions: nobody cares when you're in the office. It's very easy to set your own work life balance. Management knows that happy well-balanced workers are the most productive ones. - Incredible build environment: there's a huge amount of power at a developer's fingertips. Reviewing, testing, and code health are taken seriously. - Fascinating infrastructure: the internal environment is very open, and it's thrilling to be able to poke around and see how the Google machine ticks. - Leadership keeps us in the loop: we may not always like what they have to say, but we get weekly opportunities to ask upper management questions. - Tons of delicious food and snacks with huge variety: I've started eating five small meals on workdays instead of three big ones. - Ability to job hunt internally: if you get tired of doing what you're doing, you can do a mini job application to start with a new team. - Medical benefits: I'm continually surprised at what's covered with just a $15 copay. - Parties: Halloween and Christmas mean big fun elaborate parties, and there are lower key events like stargazing parties too. - Transportation: don't get me wrong, bay area traffic sucks, but being able to take a shuttle instead of driving gives me a good opportunity to get reading done without having to worry about transfers or other public transit snags. - Stock awards with value: sure, I missed the high risk high reward boat on this, but I probably would have bought Google stock even if I never worked here. - One hell of a rubber stamp for my resume in my eventual future job finding endeavors.
Cons
Google is inevitably becoming bigger and more corporate as time goes on. Sometimes leadership will make a decision that seems only to benefit the company to the detriment of employees or users. If you step back, everything is still great overall so it's hard to complain, but it can be troubling at times. Whenever that happens I just hug my stock real tight and remember that I can always bail if things actually start going south. So far nothing's made me consider leaving.