I know many people at the company and have visited several times. My perception: massive, massive company, with a stellar engineering-talent brand, and raw tech

I know many people at the company and have visited several times. My perception: massive, massive company, with a stellar engineering-talent brand, and raw technology that is across the board superior to all competitors. They are mostly likely the technological leader in databases, search technology, operating systems, distributed computing, cloud computing, machine learning, and self-driving cars. I say technological leader, because while they are still pretty decent at it, product design and marketing is not their strength - which explains why IMO Apple beats them in mobile (yeah, yeah, please don't argue with me on this, this is just an opinion) and Amazon beats them with cloud computing. Great perks, high pay (especially since the stock is doing so well). Contrary to the HN popular opinion, I have never heard anything negative about work life balance at Google, although I'm sure lots of companies are better at this than Google - I think the stereotype comes from Google's earlier days and the fact that workaholic types tend to be attracted to companies like Google. The major negatives relate to the fact that Google is massive and somewhat elitist about credentials. Because it is so huge, it is unlikely you will get to work on any of these cool technologies (or any exact team you want to work on, for that matter) when you're just starting out at Google, unless you have some sort of "in" into Google, are from a top school, did an internship at Google already, or otherwise have some sort of significant leg up over everyone else. But regardless you'll be exposed to lots of engineering best practices. A related problem is that because many of the infrastructure/tools are internal (not to mention light years ahead of the competition), a lot of skills you learn won't be transferable to the startup world, for example.