I was a SWE at google for a few years around 2013. I totally recommend the experience to anyone. I left to join a small startup founded by friends, another exp

I was a SWE at google for a few years around 2013. I totally recommend the experience to anyone. I left to join a small startup founded by friends, another experience I'd recommend to anyone. In particular, I learned a ton. My prior job was a startup with a totally green team. At google, I found my team incredibly bright and motivated which was contagious -- You want to work hard an succeed because everyone else does. I can't speak to how this works for other teams. I learned a ton about proper engineering, I got to see a larger, more well-written, more well-tested than I'll see in a long time. While I don't work with large-scale distributed systems written by thousands of people today, some of the lessons transfer. For me, just access to the tribal knowledge was the most useful -- I was not an SRE but learned a lot about incident response by going to talks and reading threads. Seeing what is possible and what others have done is very inspiring. I can't speak to FAAN or how G is today, but I'd recommend working there in 2013. You certainly have less of an impact at such a huge company compared to a startup, but I've also found medium-sized companies to have that same blunting of impact, without any of the benefits.