Google Reviews in London, UK Area

Pros

Big problems to deal with

Cons

Hard work if you are not based in MTV (this may not be the case if you are not in engineering)

Pros

greatest company to work for

Cons

none that are worth publicly complaining about

Advice to Senior Management

Keep going

Pros

- Relaxed environment
- Considerate to personal needs
- Great benefits
- Growing business

Cons

- Poor on boarding
- In experienced work colleagues
- Poor management
- too many meetings

Advice to Senior Management

-

Pros

Prestigious place to work in as an intern. Great opportunity to join a real project and actually launch your own code to millions of people around the world. Relaxed atmosphere and plenty of food.

Cons

The intern-ship programme could be a bit more organised. Also it takes ages for Google HR to react to anything esp. the recruiting process takes too long.

Advice to Senior Management

Be a bit more organised and focused. Know what you want to achieve because you have a lot of really gifted people getting upset because you suddenly change your decision about their project.

Pros

Google is a very dynamic environment, it's all about the people and it is an incredibly exciting place to work

Cons

Google is very set in it's ways about a few things making it hard to do certain things which can be frustrating.

Pros

great respect for employees, amazing colleagues, good work environment. Generally, a lot happens and once you gained credibility, you can change and move within the company to pursue new opportunities.

Cons

Sometimes it can take too long to be promoted or get where you want to go. Company is also turning more corporate away from the start up mentality. Very centralized decision making makes it difficult to get things done locally.

Advice to Senior Management

decentralize decision making back to local entities; shake things up a bit in the top. allow decision making even if not based on consensus. allow for more engineering support where necessary.

Pros

The work environment and the benefits are legendary and are really as good as everyone says. The *free* food is phenomenal, although I must have put on a stone and a half in my time there! The culture is exciting, the work interesting, and you really do impact millions of people around the world. Many events and theme days make going to work fun and it's really much more than your average company. Still proud to say I worked there

Cons

An expectation that you will work all hours of the day - breakfast, lunch and dinner is provided for a reason. Not the best salary in the world, but everything else that's great about the place makes up for that. There's a bit of "that's not out remit" discussion between departments, which can lead to things not being picked up.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't really have any I'm afraid

Pros

Spent 3 years there, fantastic atmosphere, great people and great leadership. Only problem was slight lack of work-life balance. All in all very good.

Cons

Work life balance was not always respected by management, plans would sometimes have to change with no warning. This was rare thought.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work

Pros

Google pays well, the benefits are remarkably good, there is a good work/life balance and the calibre of the employees is absolutely 1st class. Employees are treated very fairly, management decisions communicated well, and decision made is a collaborative, consensus driven way. The company's brand is also so strong that it is very easy to build up a great network of contacts in other company's - pretty much nobody will refuse a call from someone at Google it seems.

Cons

Google is rammed with absolutely top class people...which means it is very difficult to stand out, make promotion & get the best projects. This can be frustrating to people who have come from smaller, less well-staffed companies (who are most likely used to being the big-star) as they can end up feeling unappreciated. Googlers are also a fairly arrogant bunch...which means that it can be difficult to lead, as everyone is convinced of their own rightness, and the overly democratic method of decision making means things can move more slowly than you would hope.

Advice to Senior Management

Ratchet up the retention incentives for long-term employees...at the moment there is a huge attrition rate at 4 years as share options tend to mature then.

Pros

First of all: I have an infinite respect for the founders, their ethics, the kind of culture they infused in the company and the continuous (positive) influence that they have on how it's operated. I also admire deeply Eric Schmidt, both as a motivator and as the provider of a very strong vision and leadership. The openness, the infinite possibilities for feedback, and the attitude to listening to that feedback and try to convert it in meliorative actions is something that makes me think I wouldn't work anywhere else. Of course no company is perfect, but frankly I have a hard time trying to imagine a company working better than this one, at least for what concerns employee lifestyle, work-life balance, career possibilities, open communication, etc.

Cons

Sometimes it seems that the company loses sight of some of its activities, which results in duplication and scarce integration of efforts. Also, not everything is "interesting cutting edge technological work", at Google: sometimes very smart people have to do very boring jobs, because the areas that bring the higher income are also the most established, less innovative and most "traditional", in terms of what kind of work activities they need.

Advice to Senior Management

Sometimes a part of the engineering management seems more interested in low-value formal things (such as enforcing readability and code conventions) than to provide a great unifying vision for our products.