I worked in smaller companies and now I work at Google. I enjoyed working for smaller companies so much more. I would never make a change from a small company to Google for the same pay. I think you will be shocked by how political and non-meritocratic Google is. Living abroad is also far from being all roses.

> Google engineering with bespoke tools seemed almost magical.

Definitely not the case. It's good, but I miss git and a few other things. Their cloud IDE is really good now. Build system is OK. I miss using some better programming languages. Code cleanliness is quite high, but quality goes from yuck to really good.

The talent density is refreshing though. Every L4 I meet is pretty impressive, and it only gets better. It's not that I didn't work with amazing people at other places, it's just more frequent at Google.

Diverse backgrounds too. You see hotshot young up and comers along with grey beards at L5/L6, people with high pedigree degrees from top schools, and less common but not rare are kids who dropped out of school to do startups or something.

>What's not accessible in startups? Do you feel you gain experience on which you can build later?

I enjoy working on hard scaling problems. The scale of the problems you see at Google are unique to a handful of companies. You may or may not work on this depending on your team.

You're are the opposite of micromanaged. At L6 you are given vague goals and you have a long time to come up with a solution. Then at the end of the year they take a look at your solution and you either make the cut or don't. That is awesome for some people and terrifying for others.

>there isn't a sure financial upside.

Are you sure you're calculating all the benefits? G has an amazing 401k match, and the stock usually grows. Keep in mind if it doesn't grow, you can always get a new job, but if it does grow, you just keep raking in that extra equity.

On top of that, if you are planning on working hard and confident in your abilities, you can definitely get more than your target comp at review time. I ended up with 10% extra comp than what my offer letter said after the first year, not including stock appreciation. With stock appreciation, I'm making over 100k over what my 'target comp' (offer letter) said.

All in all, I'll say Google is not some magical programmer fantasy land utopia. It's a corporation, it has some annoying work, some politics, sometimes layoffs, sometimes bad managers, legacy code, understaffed teams and more.

But compared to all the places I've worked in my 20+ year career, it pays better, gives people more freedom, and has some really interesting problems.