Why is Google still considered top destination for engineering?

I think the exclusivity and the perks. My brother works there and he says my work sounds a lot more interesting and fulfilling than his, but he gets so many perks he feels cozy and doesnt want to jump ship. Sounds like finding cool projects at google is tougher than at Amazon.

$$$, that is all

Google is on the road to becoming Microsoft. Similar cultures, bloated orgs, late to market, innovation stagnating, political empire-building. Milking their near-monopoly cash cow. Google is still a very desirable company to work for and has amazing perks, but without some pretty large changes their glory days are over. My friends there love the pay, prestige and perks, but are bored to tears and don’t enjoy their job.

Google has been the driving force behind many changes to the tech industry such as deep learning, fault tolerant distributed databases, and so much more. Every other company follows its leveling practices, interviews, and engineering ladder(SRE, TLM, not incentivizing engineers to move to management). It also has rigorous engineering standards: solutions are long term, documentation is part of releasing a feature/product, mature testing infra, etc. No other desirable tech company has had such an impact on the tech industry

There's a lot of bloat but Google also is at the forefront of a ton of new ideas and technologies, where's it's incredibly enjoyable and fulfilling work. Not everyone has those roles of course. Also, its awesome to work for products that don't bring in revenue - you get to focus on the user and technology rather than money. This makes it way cooler for R&D style engineers. Similarly with some of the bets.

Google has not dramatically lowered its hiring bar as Amazon. So, chances of having not so good teammate is minimal..

There are definitely some weak teams I’m sure, but the people I personally work with are stellar, head and shoulders above others I’ve known at unicorns. I work thirty hours a week and make a great salary. I feel that I have absolutely rock solid job security for the medium term at least. People care about doing the right thing engineering wise in my experience. My worst complaint is that I’m sometimes bored. Also in my experience, things that sound “exciting” to work on rarely are (eg, much ML work), and things that don’t sound too exciting have tremendous engineering challenges (eg, ads).

Yes. It out pays anyone if u don't take into account of fake paper money. Every One.

Because no one else has taken that spot. Let's think about which other company can become the top destination for engineers. 1. Facebook - most likely contender - they have high quality engineers, a money printing machine and good culture. I think they're missing some of the moonshot thinking, though. Organizationally, they're more product-led than Google is. 2. Amazon - next likely contender given their history and growth. I think their culture hurt them in retaining strong engineers and now their hiring bar is low. 3. Uber - they had a chance when they hired some strong engineers from Google/FB early on. Like Amazon, culture and their own scandals affected them. 4. Netflix - Too small and too niche. Also I think not hiring new grads hurts their brand. 5. Other unicorns - most other unicorns aren't technically strong. I can speak for my current employer - we're very focused on design, business etc and don't have a ton of strong engineering leaders. I've heard similar stories from friends at Airbnb, Snap etc 6. Microsoft/IBM/Oracle - might as well work for the government.