One should also ask the question: would you want to work at Google today. This is not the Google of 2002 ... or even the Google of 2010. 2017 Google is like 1

One should also ask the question: would you want to work at Google today. This is not the Google of 2002 ... or even the Google of 2010. 2017 Google is like 1999 Microsoft. Lots of brilliant people working on heavily resourced projects ... but also significant bureaucracy and many political animals in what was formerly a pristine engineering "garden of eden". You can see a lot of Google projects struggling now, and many startups in the same space as Google projects doing much better than more resourced teams doing the same thing at Google. Nobody ever got fired at Google for spending all day brilliantly arguing on Google's internal newsgroups and not doing any real work. And it shows in Google's work culture. Imagine a person doing that at a startup ... or Amazon for that matter. They would not survive very long. If you are young, and have many years of productive/earning years ahead of you, it might make sense to turn down a Google offer to try something a bit more "bloody" and hectic for a few years before you settle down in a comfy Google job. There are many brilliant people you can learn from at Google ... but very few work very hard. And hard, productive work is a skill to learn too.