Google – “It's hit or miss depending where you land”

Pros

Free food, cool perks, 30" screen, smart people. Great positive environment if you are in one of the few projects with an excellent manager.
Brand name: it will help a lot to have Google on your resumé when you'll run away.

Cons

Most managers are jokes and if you are not their pet employee will barely know you exist. This mean that on quarterly and annual review your manager will inflate the work done by his favorite employees and strongly back their deserving for a bonus, promotion etc, while having little to say to the committees about the value of your work. If promotions are rare and reserved for a select few, raises are almost non-existent and far below inflation.

20% time mean you have to sleep less and work more during the week and forget about weekends. The running joke is that 20% percent means you work 20% more time than the current 140% time you spend on a fictional 40h work week.

Taking vacation lower your performance ratings resulting in lower bonus and less chance for a promotion or raise. Same goes for sick days, parental leave, or even for being unreachable on a weekend (while not on call).

Some of my coworkers had to complain to HR about their managers and got little support. HR would not recognize any wrongdoing and downplay issues as personality mismatch and misunderstandings. I've witnessed situations unblock with HR only after a VP was contacted for help by the employee.

Advice to Senior Management

Get back in touch with the grumpy people, they are saying out loud what the majority is thinking silently. Of course you'll have old timers that are in a niche and know the right people to love how they are being treated, also you have the happy newbies that are not disappointed yet of not being recognized after a full year of hard working. Grumpiness is usually dismissed as 'entitlement' from some employees, but these same employees accepted lower salaries to join Google in exchange for working in Lala Land, of course they are grumpy when they wake up.

Make the career development efforts real, making bigger promisees without actually delivering real results will just frustrate the employees more. Develop and facilitate exchange programs between roles, but not limited to 10-20 people, that's not how you satisfy 10000 unsatisfied employees. Requiring that you be a top top performer in your current role is ridiculous, if the employees want to try something else it's probably because they not so happy in their current role and not performing at their full potential.

One way to improve career development and work life balance is to have *strong* incentives for managers to truly support *all* their employees to do 20% time, career development, work life balance. Also force the manager to take their vacation days, instead of setting the benchmark of working all the time. A manager that lose several his direct reports in a few months and unable to hiring replacements should be harshly sanctioned, not promoted.

Conduct surveys more often, one Googlegeist per year does not seem to help that much when it takes so much time to react and see the results. Open the committees to silent attendants, so employees can see how the process truly works, instead of hearsay and the 'official' guidelines. Create incentives for work/life balance, it's fine to reward the workaholics but too much of it, as it is now, destroys team morale.

React *now*, it will be too late after mid-september when I predict a massive exodus of under-appreciated talented people. Remember they are amongst the best in the industry and will easily find a place at your competitors even with the bad economy.