1. Guys, I don't know if it is the right thing to do, to disclose my name and let all kind of potential recruiters drop me off their list, but what the heck, the topic is too hot.
2. I spent 3.5 years at Google; the first year was amazing... and in any case, there are lots of great people there, and I had an opportunity to meet many, and work with some.
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4. Unfortunately, in spite of the common belief, I think the average level of Google engineers is mediocre. With a lot of arrogance, too. Everybody believes he (males dominate) is better than his neighbor. So it is really hard to discuss any issue unless it is your friend you are talking to. Objective discussions are pretty rare, since everybody's territorial, and not interested in opinions of other people unless those people are Important Gods. Grass-root bureaucracy prevails, and the ubiquitous code reviews only help it; someone who just got an approval on his JavaScript abilities will tell you that in JavaScript you cannot pass around functions because "it is not allowed, we have to bind"... etc. I never saw this kind of attitude in rank-and-file employees in other companies - usually, only so-called architects tend to overcome common sense and scientific knowledge in favor of their own funny beliefs.
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6. I had a misfortune of starting my own 20% project, onscreen keyboard (you can see it now if you open Google main page in a foreign language); it took me about 60 seconds to get an approval from Marissa Mayer, and a year to find a place to deploy my scripts, 20k each, 70+ in total; I sure could just deploy them on my own website hosted at GoDaddy, but it was not allowed - and Borg did not have enough space for my 1.5M data. And so on.
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8. In the last team I found myself in such a sea of lies, like K in Kafka's "The Castle", that I was totally lost... sighed and went ahead interviewing... they hit me first though; I was, and probably still am in their blacklist. Politics is my weak point of course.
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10. So, if you ask me whether it's worth working at Google - yes, it is; you'll learn a lot; is it worth to stay there? - no, it is bad for your karma, you may become one of them.