Say what you will but Google is still a great place to work in my opinion. Work life balance is great, coworkers are solid, mentorship is abundant, culture is still great (subjective, but still true when I compare my experience to friends who work at other companies), there is continual investment in tooling and developer productivity, etc. I'm not just shilling because I work there and want to justify it to myself. I regularly investigate alternatives and cannot justify leaving when I'm happy.
I currently work at Google (though my time will be ending soon due to this shit show) and everything you said couldn’t be farther from the truth at least for me. I want to make sure everyone has both sides here instead of the rosey picture that so many want to paint.
Google is, by far, the worst place I’ve ever worked with the most useless work and uninspiring management and coworkers. I haven’t learned a damn thing in my time there. FB had its problems but I was at least learning there.
To me not being able to be fully remote is a complete non-starter for any job. I've been remote for the last 5 years, no way in hell I'd give up that freedom to be chained to an office again.
Also I'm not interested in wasting my time studying competitive programming questions for those interviews.
But sure if you love grinding Leetcode and don't mind being chained to a desk, I'm sure Google is alright.
