Google Reviews in Mountain View, CA

Pros

High concentration of smart + great people.
Employees empowered to change the word in the good way.
Full compensation package (base salary + bonus + stock + perks) is great and not easy to beat IMO, People who criticize it must have not done the math right and/or are performing poorly.

Cons

Career growth is somewhat difficult for non standard profiles (i.e. not Software Engineers or Site Reliability Engineers).
Managers need to be good to get their reports promoted.
Being on the "right" project (aka high impact with high visibility) does affect substantially career growth.

Advice to Senior Management

Make sure to focus on career growth at all levels. Train managers well too.
Reward well people doing the grunchy work/production/maintenance work.

Pros

Great pay, great projects, smart people to work with

Cons

Now Google is big or even huge, all kinds of people, hate the bureaucracy there, reminds me of IBM or Microsoft pyramid management

Advice to Senior Management

Let junior people complain

Pros

Amazing perks, benefits and pay
Interesting work and smart colleagues (middle managers are the exception).
Concern for change is there, empowerment to do so unfortunately isn't given to the recruiting team.

Cons

Shocked by the rather incompetent recruiting leadership on the sales team supporting at best a rather mediocre experience for hiring managers and candidates.

Rote, robot like recruiting process which is driven by levels and espouses "in the box" thinking.

Middle managers (Staffing Managers) are the epitomy of let's do things to please Larry vs. let's question and innovate.

Google Recruiting is like a big filter. Mediocre Staffing Managers that measure against silly metrics and measure the team on a curve they themselves could never meet.

Everyone is afraid to question the process or make changes. HR is a puppet at best with no strong recruiting leaders pushing innovation.

Advice to Senior Management

Bring in a consultant to revamp the entire recruiting philosophy, map the right team based on this revised strategy. Get rid of middle managers more concerned about their upward mobility vs. smarter ways to hire. No one has questioned the hiring process @ Google and yet that's exactly what needs to be done.

Pros

open culture, freedom of choosing projects.

Cons

over-time work. seems everyone works late on weekends.

Pros

Perks - all of them. Free food, celebrity visits, gym, bikes, tech talks, etc.

Cons

Too many incompetent mid-level managers

Advice to Senior Management

Take action when mid-level managers get poor ratings rather than sit around for years until they royally screw up at the expense of their team's growth.

Pros

People, vision, willingness to take risk, open culture

Cons

Things change fast! Need to stay on your toes!

Pros

Google has high quality employees. This makes it a great place to work at because you get to learn from people with all sorts of talents.

Cons

As Google is expanding, it is losing a lot of appeals from the good old days of being a start-up. The transparency between upper management and ordinary employees is not as it is used to be.

Advice to Senior Management

Besides meeting deadlines, keep some room for the employees to be creative. The 20% time rule is losing its ground in some groups that I worked at.

Pros

- Great perks (free food, shuttle, massage, everything)
- Super smart people
- Very interesting projects with a lot of reach

Cons

It's still a very big company. It's not microsoft yet, but it's getting there. It's a pretty long chain of command.

Pros

The following is related to sales operations management.
You'll work with very smart people, and get a lot of support and feedback around doing your best work. Most senior managers have great knowledge, a lot of advice to offer, and value open, transparent communication.
You'll likely work the hardest you've ever worked at Google, but you'll also be greatly rewarded. Also, Google makes it very easy to work your hardest, and that's a huge bonus if you're interested in super-charging your career.
Example (day in the life): take free shuttle to work; use available corp vehicles to run daytime errands; grab a hand brewed coffee and gourmet breakfast before starting work; communicate with brightest in your industry during the day; visit a tech-talk and learn something new; workout in the gym w/ a trainer before lunch; have lunch with a colleague at 1 of >15 free themed cafes; grab an espresso shot from the micro-kitchen on way to your desk; collaborate on a new project with someone in a different working group; back to your own work; quick $5 chair massage to rejuvenate; swing by tech-stop on way to grab a new mouse, before your professional desk ergonomic consultation begins; more work; grab gourmet dinner starting at 6:30; woah, it's late - time to go home; grab late (8:30) shuttle home. (I guess i'll have to do my laundry for free at work tomorrow).

Cons

Google is changing, and it's experiencing some growing pains.
There are new projects and focus areas every week, and the grouping of functions and teams changes constantly. As a result, managers are responsible to new macro functional groups, and new projects or focus areas every month or so. This seems an unnecessary distraction, amounting to 25% superfluous work.
The change in org structure has made it hard to maintain the career path of your choice. Instead, you must choose from available Google-centric career paths. These are not always (or often) composed of conventional roles, since Google is both changing rapidly, and unconventional to begin with.
Most of the people hired at Google 5+ years ago, don't have the credentials to be hired there today. This complicates internal transfers, even though HR attempts to solve that issue.
Those joining Google from acquisitions are rarely hirable at Google in any other way, yet their experience and contributions once onboard are typically at par. This again complicates the internal transfer process.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more accommodating to veteran Googlers. The company is changing very fast, and they need active guidance to navigate successfully. Active - not reactive.
Be more direct when providing guidance and mentoring to all managers and direct reports. Google is getting a bit too "careful", and I've found that more managers these days are reluctant to tell it like it is, for fear of appearing undiplomatic. Diplomacy and tact should make a manager a better communicator, not a constrained one.

Pros

plenty of opportunities
cool technology
good perks

Cons

24/7 job
no guidance
on your own for growth

Advice to Senior Management

more proactive