Pros

Google is a great place for a computer scientist. There are large problems that need to be solved at enormous scale. Engineers are treated with huge amounts of respect and are listened to in regard to improving productivity and removing redtape. Google has great benefits like free food. I've forgotten how to make my own lunch.

Cons

Unfortunately Google is a big company, so there's always red tape. How much you have to deal with it depends on which group you end up in. It can be hard to see how your project fits into the grand scheme of thing given how big the company is now.

Advice to Senior Management

Why do I have to offer advice to management? Meh, I can do that internally. Google has plenty of avenues to talk to our bosses.

Pros

Great Benefits, interesting environment to work in. It is great that people can bring their dog to work , but some people are allergic and some people like cats.

Cons

Google values their processes more than the employees and the knowledge those employees have. I also think the time spent in meetings could be better spent accomplishing work.

Advice to Senior Management

I think management would do well to learn to have fewer meetings, and focus on working more. Management focuses too much on the future plans and creating processes and does not tend to the processes that are already in place.

Pros

- Smart people
- Great technology
- Engineering driven
- Huge impact on the world
- Profitable and financially stable
- Perks

Cons

- Base pay average, though bonus is high
- low number shares of stock (plus, stock prices are low compared to peak)
- Getting big and bureaucratic (e.g., launch process long and painful)
- Harder to advance because of stronger peers
- Minimal management attention: non-self-starters can get lost

Advice to Senior Management

- Pay employees more
- Cut the bureaucracy and make things easier

Pros

Was a remote job. All web based. Nice on the resume. Very few requirements other than languages speaking and search knowledge.

Cons

No cons to complain about. The job was simple enough. The pay wasn't high enough to justify any sort of con list. I was a peon!

Advice to Senior Management

Had no management. Was all web based with electronic report cards based on how fast you worked and the quality of work performed.

Pros

-Amazing perks....free gym, food is the best.
-Young and fun co workers.

Cons

-No room for growth.
-If you are a contractor and didn't go to a top tier school, you will not become permanent.
-GPA is more important than job performance for movement within.
-Work isn't challenging as you are just another person sitting behind a computer.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of the top tier university/gpa requirement for permanent employees.

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.

Pros

-Free food

-Very young management and college-like atmosphere

-Google's market dominance and absence of significant competitors

-Potential for high salaries at the higher management levels

-Very smart people

Cons

-Low compensation for the lower positions

-Limited promotion opportunities

-Most people here are over qualified for the type of work they do, resulting in lack of challenge.

-Becoming increasingly bureaucratic as it grows, which means more budget approvals and red tape.

-Hard to diffirentiate yourself amongst all the smart people, making it harder to advance.

-The lower pay in Google is supposed to be balanced out by all the 'perks' provided to you in the office, however unless you think that someone else knows better your consumption habits, you would probably want to have the cash instead!

Advice to Senior Management

Be more open to new ideas and encourage cross-team collaboration.

Pros

The many perks including free gourmet food, snacks galore, cultural events, speakers/authors, lots of smart people from all over the world to meet and work with. Many choices of projects to work on and relative freedom to do so. There is plenty of work to do here from improving existing systems and creating new products. Kid in a candy store if you are eager and driven to make things better. Wide range of technologies - handhelds, operating systems, HTML5, Linux, file systems, compilers.

Cons

Lots of smart people, but lots of subpar people somehow managed to get hired as well.
20% time is a myth. I suppose some people get to do that. I don't know any personally as every group I've worked with is stressed and working hard on the project they're on.
At Google it was better to be early than good. Being in the wake of a mass exodus of (mostly) young millionaires (many of whose first job was Google) and being handed their mediocre work to fix can really kill your incentive to "go further" here, especially when later senior folks are not well compensated equity-wise. Google is a big company that provides a comfy job but none of the burning desire to go that extra mile because they aren't making the effort to take you with them.

Advice to Senior Management

Get better at rewarding your post-IPO senior people. We weren't lucky enough to get here early, but we are fixing much of what was left us by a sea of (industry) inexperienced academics. When hiring, try to focus more on real-world skills and industry experience rather than degrees and GPAs.

Pros

I believe that Google offers one of the best internships available to students. They not only issue students a great deal of responsibility, they also cater a great deal socially, organising many events (from mini-festivals, to international internship expos, to sea safari's in Dublin).

During the internship, I had many 1:1 meetings with my manager who offered good advice and feedback about the project I was given.

Great brand name on the CV.

Cons

For my first week, I was given the task of working in the "AdWords Approval Bin" - a place where all automatically disapproved ads are kept and individually screened by Google employees. Many interns were given this for a week or two. Some people apparently spent half their internship doing it. Its not challenging nor stimulating - its very repetitive.

Although they do give interns big projects, from my experience very few of the projects (especially if they are focused on AdWords) will be implemented. This is due to the fact that most changes to AdWords are typically incremental and only seem to tweak what has already proved itself to be a very succesful product.

Advice to Senior Management

From what I heard from other interns, most had secured their position through a referral. This makes it very difficult for anyone without a referral to get into Google, and is unfair.

Pros

- excellent perks
- good management
- no micro managing
- lots of interesting projects
- great coworkers
- flexibility about telecommuting

Cons

- sometimes long hours
- too many projects going on at once
- too much emphasis on GPA's

Advice to Senior Management

N/A