(Disclaimer: I was a software engineering intern at Google during the summers of 2013 and 2014.) In the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, Google felt like

(Disclaimer: I was a software engineering intern at Google during the summers of 2013 and 2014.) In the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, Google felt like the dream place to work. Yes, a lot has been said about the perks and the generous pay, but another thing that made Google appealing was its cutting edge projects. I was a huge fan of Google Inbox (sadly long discontinued). As a graduate student researching storage systems and who enjoyed reading the MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner papers, being able to work on Spanner as an intern was a dream come true. I also loved all of the internal support I received as a developer, from the amazing internal infrastructure to the various internal tutorials. I never felt siloed off from the rest of the company, compared to other employers I've had. It was an amazing place to work and I'd rank it as my second-best work experience (my best being eight months I spent at Fujitsu Laboratories in Kawasaki, Japan where I worked in a storage lab on an SSD cache....that was a downright magical experience), though granted as an intern I was shielded from the performance review process and on-calls, so I can't comment about these things. I would love to work for a team similar to the teams I worked on during my internships at Google, as well as the general feeling of 2013-14 Google. However, I'm under the impression that Google's culture started changing a lot during the Alphabet reorganization and the rise of Sundar Pichai as CEO. I don't know if there's a place in the Valley these days that captures the feel of pre-Alphabet Google; it seems to me that the Valley itself has changed a lot (and for the worse) since roughly 2015, but that's another discussion for another time.