As another former Googler, this was one of the most concerning things about my experience at Google. The pressure I put on myself and received from others when I was debating whether to leave was enormous, especially because it was my first job.
This was one of the reasons I decided to bail out after the first phone interview. I had some serious concerns, such as:
- I am not interested in working as an SRE when I just finished a PhD in Computational Linguistics.
- I am not really interested in living in London or Silicon Valley.
But any such question were all waved away with an air of 'such concerns are all irrelevant if you can work for the greatest company in existence'. The interviewer was really a nice person, but there seemed to be an immense groupthink.
(I now also have strong moral objections to working for Google, but that's another story.)