Not good. I've seen people rapidly shift to career protection, wagon-circling, and empire building. I've seen more competition for leading junior people since

Not good. I've seen people rapidly shift to career protection, wagon-circling, and empire building. I've seen more competition for leading junior people since there are fewer new hires coming in. But mostly I've seen the company become more cynical towards executives. Depending on your feelings on AI, you might see new excitement and opportunity opening up or further meddling and messy product management in the future. I'm not sure where I land here yet. I think Google is still a very good place to work. Pay is high. WLB is great (at least where I sit). Tooling is very good. I haven't had any asshole managers or directors. But I definitely find it hard to get people excited about taking a big risk or maintain a project that is important but somehow misaligned with what your VP cares about.