Google – “Best regular job I've had. However ...”

Pros

* A nerd's paradise, in all the good ways. World-changing projects, brilliant engineers, infrastructure that dwarfs almost all competitors, and a dinosaur and a spaceship to boot.

* "The future is here, just not widely distributed." The production software systems that Googlers use on a daily basis are unparalleled. Only a few other companies have this many users over this many products.

* Opportunities to work on many different projects, but you will have to seek them out. Google's rewards are there for the digging, but no one's going to hand you a treasure map. Recent graduates won't find a career plan laid out for them. Then again, all jobs after Google are probably going to suck in comparison.

Cons

* It's a big company now. There's a constant effort to retain a startup culture, but Google's bureaucracy continues to grow.

* Work effort imbalance. No, not "work-life balance." There is a disparity between work hours and productivity among teams and individuals which is just now being addressed. Still plenty of slackers to kick out the door, though.

* Not really a meritocracy. Google hires smart, motivated young people, winds them up, and tells them to change the world. There is a natural disillusionment when someone realizes that the ability to move products is proportional to your distance to Larry and Sergey, after all.

* Culture skew. Google's Mountain View office is the epitome of Silicon Valley -- a giant gifted program where the kids can work whatever eighty hours a week they want (or 96, if you're doing 20% time.) It's soft, nonconfrontational, and passive-aggressive in an overcaffeinated NorCal way -- with the exception of production systems, which have to use genuine aggression to keep people from breaking the site. This culture doesn't travel well -- be it the (uh, slim) work hours at the "distributed offices" to a lack of technical resources overseas. Unfortunately the one cultural nuance which has spread worldwide is Googley entitlement. Mountain View dominates and will continue to do so.

Advice to Senior Management

* Get serious about canceling projects which don't perform and breaking apart teams that don't deliver.

* More of the distributed offices need to close.