I may be biased since I interned at Google in 2013 and 2014, but Google in the 2000s and early 2010s felt downright magical as someone who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research. They made impressive technologies that still hold up today, like MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner. They hired many legends of computer science and software engineering, such as Rob Pike and Jeff Dean.

I’m concerned about the power that Google and other Big Tech companies have, but from a technical point of view Google has a lot of impressive technologies, and from a workplace standpoint, it seemed idyllic back in the early 2010s, though I’ve heard the work culture has changed in the past decade, and I may have rose-colored glasses from only being an intern there, never a full-timer.

Google can't tarnish Vint Cerf.

There are lots of brilliant people at Google who do no evil.

The fact that the company makes evil decisions about the direction of the web, privacy, and performs blatantly monopolistic actions does not outweigh the good things people at Google have done. At least not yet.

You can hate the company but love the brilliant work the engineers have done. The same can be said of lots of companies: Apple, Anthropic, ...

Meta, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. It's less of an overt monopoly, but some of its actions are heinously amoral.