Google Reviews in Kirkland, WA

Pros

great work lot of bucks

Cons

no issues at all whatsoever

Advice to Senior Management

great work

Pros

See your company and maybe your work in the headlines.
Work with some of the best and brightest co-workers in the world.
Work with applications that millions of people use and enjoy.
Great food, good benefits and bonuses.
Information exchange inside the company is quite open, making it easy to find out about opportunities.

Cons

Can be hard to transfer to a new project, which can lead to the need to excel at something you don't like in order to earn your way out of it.

The opportunities for 20% time are real, but you may not have enough time and energy to make use of them.

Management is often hands-off and not necessarily helpful/encouraging. Find peers to encourage and support you.

Pros

Freedom of what to work on;
Lots of areas;
Engineers are highly respected;
Knowledge are shared across company;
Great infrastructure to minimize work burden;

Cons

Weak management;
Sometimes directions are kind of random;

Pros

Three excellent gourmet meals a day (free), and the best food out of all the Google offices I've been to (including fresh-baked cookies during ice cream hour!). Tremendous opportunities for professional and personal growth with several tech talks and classes every week. Every aspect of the organization is cooperatively engineered, peer-reviewed, and open to feedback and iterative improvement. A high level of respect is maintained between peers and managers alike. Consistently high annual bonus. Aggressive 401k and donation matching programs. Salaries are substantially higher since November 2010 when the scale was significantly adjusted upward.

Cons

They spoil us. I'm glad I worked elsewhere between college and Google, otherwise I might not realize how great of a place this is to work. I'm on-call for several services for about 48 hours each month, though the pager is relatively calm. Google admittedly makes mistakes in hiring, often turning away good candidates if there's any doubt; as a result, many smart people are bitter about Google because they get turned down--but I encourage them to try again in a year or so. And if you wear Google-branded apparel in public, sometimes weirdos stop you and ask lots of bizarre questions about what it's like to work there.

Pros

Smart co-workers
Great food
Interesting, high-impact projects
Many learning opportunities
High pay
Good benefits
30 inch monitor
Seemingly unlimited computing resources

Cons

A sense of entitlement from some employees
With so many reports per manager, it is easy to get over looked if you don't speak up
Group offices. Sometimes I really want a door and a quiet place to work

Advice to Senior Management

The management is doing great. The feeling of trust I get from management at Google helps me to feel committed to my work. Of course, mileage may vary depending on individual managers, but I've been very lucky here. And Eric is the best CEO I've encountered.

Pros

Great benefits, working at a company everyone respects and says "wow" to, getting to help build the products that really are changing the world. The hours are reasonable, you are treated as a human being and respected as an engineer, and the on-site breakfast lunch and dinner are unmatched anywhere. Luckily google makes their billions using only a small fraction of their total workforce, leaving lots of capital available to dedicate resources to other projects that aren't purely motivated by short-term profits (but rather those that help build press for the organization and are theoretically interesting and innovative at the same time). Tech-talks about a whole range of topics not strictly required for you to carry out your job responsibilities but just for your general education are a huge plus. Google employs some of the most innovative thinkers and builders of our time.

Cons

Very large organization. Seemed to provide fewer job advancement opportunities than I was looking for. Little project ownership (feature ownership perhaps, but typically the project involves many many people). In my case, the project had three different managers who worked out of two different offices, leading to lots of confusion.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate and coordinate with the other managers to make sure you're presenting a unified vision of the company.

Pros

Google is leader on web search and has the best web search infrastructure. It is convenient for engineers to work on a single company-wide code base with same coding standard. Company reissues employee stock option to $308 recently. Bigger percentage of annual bonus compare to other companies I know of; $8000 per year 401k match; free meal and other perks. Company has the perception of being an innovative company. Friday TGIF with beer and wine. Engineers’ qualities are general fine. Many satellite offices so people don’t always have to relocate. For the first one or two years, you will be excited to explore the infrastructures, tools, systems and dream about a career path.

Cons

Office environment – It could be very noisy and interruptive with 5 to 10 persons sitting in one room. It’s not the best setting for strong and independent engineers to focus and develop solid code. There are such engineers in our office that hardly able to focus and be quiet for more than 30 minutes, always talk loud and flatter each other. I am annoyed and disturbed on an hourly basis.

Project management: poor project management, lack of discipline and launch schedule. It’s very hard to estimate what and by when project will be launched. There is no one to enforce some discipline on code quality and stability. Launch delay quarter after quarter. When accountability finally comes and the project risks of being canceled, I see desperate launch push and poor code quality.

Manager role: Managers and directors usually stay far away from daily project management duties. Manager does not know what individual software engineer is doing so don’t slightly expect such otherwise you will be disappointed. Majority managers are not technically strong and write zero or negligible code. Don’t expect much technical inspirations or lead by example from your manager. You will neither see much career mentoring nor other “soft” help from the manager. I had 1:1 with my previous manager maybe 3~4 times during the whole year period. Despite being the “manager” of our project, all his involvement was showing up a few times in our project meeting and later claims making big impact to the project on his self performance evaluation.

Career growth: Despite the peer review model, the manager’s feedbacks appear to be what really matter. People that are vocal and suck up to their managers are very more likely to be promoted. If you are hard-working engineer that is able to and like to solve hard problems independently without making superficial noises, and expect Google to recognize your contributions, you will be very disappointed. I know some of such solid and senior engineers; about half of them already let Google. This is very counter-intuitive given the perception people have about Google.

Project and team: Google is primarily an advertisement (instead of technology) company. The web search infrastructure is awesome however only need a relatively small number of people work on that. The available projects for most people, especially in satellite offices, are limited and not technically hard-core. If you are a senior and talented engineer, you may not find a local project that allows you to focus and solve hard challenging technical problems. It also becomes harder to find other senior talented engineers that you respect and love to work on, given senior engineers are leaving and junior engineers are joining.

Engineering quality: I am disappointed with the code quality of my current team. Despite Google’s code review standard and practices, too many times people hastily touch existing code or add hacky code with no real testing. Such code checked in and deployed to data center. Overall it requires a lot more unnecessary iterations and bug fixes to stabilize the system. I don’t mind working 60 hours per week at all but it is frustrated to see most time wasted dealing with silly buggy integrated system. There is no engineering process to ensure code quality and stability or make a launch date more predictable. I see a general lack of engineering discipline and experience to implement very solid code from software engineers with no or just a few years experience.

Advice to Senior Management

Value more and treat fairly engineers with lots of pre-Google experience. Balance engineer level and management level. Fix the promotion process to be not a popularity or suck up contest.

Pros

extraordinary co-employees, some of the most brilliant people on the planet. knowledge is enormous all around you. embraces a keep it simple philosophy in making products instead of a bloated overloaded features product.

Cons

no management, no growth, no understanding of what you're working on and how it fits into the big picture, working on minute feature areas, working on features that generate no revenue, having to play the political game to move up the ladder

Advice to Senior Management

get back to the days of making a great product for users rather than doing what seems politically advantageous

Pros

Google is a very nice company to work for. The company is very transparent about its policies and directions, and keeps every one up-to-date of latest development.

People have strong ownership of things they do. And I feel that compensation is really good. The bonus is really generous (about 30% of your salary), and the benefits are excellent.

Cons

Benefits are excellent, but I think Microsoft's medical coverage is better, and Microsoft matches charitable donation up to 12,000 per year but Google only matches up to 3,000.

Advice to Senior Management

I think management is very good in Google. The organization hierarchy is fairly lean. My manager has 30 people reporting to him, so, it's hard for any manager to micro-manage, and that gives people a lot of ownership of their projects.

Pros

The opportunity to work on projects that are interesting and cutting-edge.

Cons

The scope of the non-salary benefits means that salary can be less than optimal.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep it up; pay attention to the remote offices.