Googler here. Opinions are obviously my own and not that for my employer. Just sharing my thoughts, take it all with a grain of salt. I've been at Google ful

Googler here. Opinions are obviously my own and not that for my employer. Just sharing my thoughts, take it all with a grain of salt. I've been at Google full time for 5+ years and was an intern before that. The company has more than doubled in size since I've been here, so I'm not exactly old-school but I have seen change. When I started Google felt like one company. I was blown away that I could look at any piece of code (besides Google X and parts of Android) and file a bug against any team when something didn't work. I felt proud of other team's products and I also felt responsible for them, I filed a lot of bugs/feedback trying to make random things better. The culture was also just fun as hell. The mailing lists and Memegen (our internal meme site) were really fun to participate in for the most part. A lot has changed now. Each product feels more isolated and does things their own way. The company is far too big for anyone to claim they really know what's going on outside their local area. The culture is no longer fun at all. There is a lot more negativity, and a lot of it is justified (you've seen the news). However I still love the people I work with directly and what we work on (Firebase, fwiw). And one strange positive about how large the company has gotten is that I can just focus on that. I no longer get too worked up about what's going on over in far-flung teams and that's fine with me. And I don't naively participate in company-wide forums expecting a good mood. But I get to build cool things and we have more resources (money, people, knowledge, etc) than we know what to do with. All of that is to say that yes, a lot has changed. Some for the worse, some for the better, some just different. I still think this is a great place to work and I don't plan to leave any time soon.