Comment by apphacker

What's the draw for an engineer to work at Google these days? Seems like you'd be a small toad in a gigantic pond where your ripples make little impact. Kind of like working at Oracle or IBM or Microsoft or <Big Software Company>. Except there are those dumb bikes all around the campus. Yet still there seems to be this perception there is something 'special' about working at Google that sets it apart from any of the other places, isn't there? The emperor has no clothes? It's not like you're going to get any wealthier from options there than you would at any other relatively same sized company.