Pros

great benefits
amazing people to work with
wonderful work environment
amazing food!
innovative work environment

Cons

Sometimes decisions are made top down with little to no involvement from middle management.
Although they have peer recognition programs in place I don't think management does enough to recognize the efforts of their employees -- especially their managers.
The extensive collaboration can at times drag projects out because everyone has to be involved and have their say in the project.
As a larger company now -- Google seems to be far more process and structure driven -- partly out of necessity -- but it has changed the overall attitude and work environment.

Advice to Senior Management

Recognize the efforts of your managers and involve manager in the decisions especially when it comes to initiatives that impact the people they manage.

Pros

- Technical resources
- Benefits and Perks
- Huge number of interesting projects
- Smart coworkers
- Freedom to manage your own work

Cons

Google is now a very big company, and decisions involve a lot of people -- some times it's hard to get things done even if they seem simple.

Advice to Senior Management

More focus on products that will actually make a difference in the marketplace would help the company continue to grow.

Pros

Smart peers, good benefits, interesting work

Cons

no work life balance support

Advice to Senior Management

better balance work life balance

Pros

The benefits at Google are amazing. The free 5-star catering for lunch. The decent breakfast and dinner options. We even have a sushi-chef on-site in the NYC office. The entire company and all of its employees enjoy learning and it is very respected when you take internal training courses and/or share industry information with your peers. You are expected to be brilliant. You are expected to output great, creative, innovative work. You are expected to be the best of the best. And they only hire the best candidates out of top-tier private schools with applicable research, industry or work experience.

Cons

The downside of working at Google is getting lost among all the other brilliant people. The loudest and most talkative employees are the ones that get the most recognition. The people who complain the most get the most attention.

Advice to Senior Management

You are doing a good job in recent years in trying to balance how promotions and recognition is distributed during review season. Thank you.

Pros

* Great Co-workers. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive in this area. My co-workers are smart, motivated, and trustworthy. I can count on them for design and execution.
* Great products. Loving the product you work on is great motivation for getting up in the morning.
* Engineer-oriented. Product managers for the most part do not call the shots. Engineering bears most of the responsibility for design, timelines, etc.
* Flexible hours. Performance really is king; engineers have a lot of flexibility in deciding when to come in and leave.
* Food. Delicious.
* Idealism. "Don't be evil" isn't just some marketing ploy that insiders scoff at. There's a real culture of accountability.
* Stability. I heard of no one in engineering that was worried about their job due to the global economic crisis.
* Scale. You're probably working on something millions of people use. There's great job satisfaction in that.

Cons

* Limited upside compared to a start-up. You don't come to Google thinking you're going to strike it rich in one fell swoop anymore. This is the price of stability.
* Company has grown quite large. There's something intangible that changes with growth, and even getting to know everyone in your extended team can be hard. There are no all-company events anymore. These have been replaced with organization-specific events.
* Management quality varies. I have a great manager but I've heard horror stories.
* Your initial project is assigned based on expressed preferences and relevant experience. It may take time to get off of it if you don't like it.
* Ramp up may take some time, but don't get discouraged as this is expected. The software stack is almost all in-house and so there's indirect transfer to other systerms.

Advice to Senior Management

Overall senior management is extremely competent, and product vision is well articulated. Better training for middle management should be a priority. Proposed increase to financial efficiency (e.g., by cutting perks) should be weighed against the impact on employee satisfaction (they've done reasonably well in this area).

Pros

the perks ad name recognition are second to none

Cons

It's an engineering company that just happens to need sales people

Advice to Senior Management

great place to work, but more attention needs to be paid to the sales organization.

Pros

Excellent benefits
Exciting company atmosphere. Who doesn't like working for a company that is frequently in media headlines
Intelligent colleagues you can learn from

Cons

Frequent re-organizations which can cause your career to move more laterally than vertically
Many of Google's senior managers are better as individual contributors than team/group leaders

Advice to Senior Management

People management should be a top priority. Some of the leaders that you have hired/promoted are great visionaries, salesmen, individual contributors, but not great leaders. They do not energize the masses to do their best and get behind a common goal. Google needs more great people managers.

Pros

B r a n d n a m e ! !
P e r k s
M o n e y

Cons

No career growth.
Half the time you feel if you are actually doing anything useful.
Very frustating and depressing at times.

Advice to Senior Management

Diversify into more areas besides the "core" area of search. Google has so much cash -- use it.. For example, consumer devices.. phones, video games, set-top boxes, etc...

Pros

Good food, good perks, fun smart people.

Cons

They hire too many young overachievers - people who have only ever "shown aptitude for having aptitude", as that one writer said. So it feels like half of everyone is angry about learning what being in the workforce is actually like, and shocked that you don't get promoted for working 12 hours a day and having aptitude and a great GPA.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer a class to the young employees about this topic: reality. Actually, also make the older employees who have only ever worked at Google take the same class. This includes many in senior management.

Pros

I worked here as a technical sourcer on a 1 year contract. Overall, the company is great - not much to complain about when you're getting fed 3 free awesome meals a day + unlimited sushi/smoothie/snacks inbetween. i loved how they allowed you to bring pet dogs to work. love the on site massage, oil changes, author talks, volleyball, etc.

Cons

no room for growth as contractor and management made many empty promises

Advice to Senior Management

didn't work close enough with management to provide input here