Google Reviews in New York City, NY Area

Pros

Free food, great benefits, young colleagues.

Cons

Demanding projects, forced to work nights just to meet deadlines, threatened to be fired.

Pros

good work-life balance, openness about important company information from the top-down, dedicated to providing feedback and resources to help you develop professionally

Cons

pay is okay; work is not easy. lots of internal procedures are always changing and often confusing; not enough hierarchy; difficult to maintain a balance with so many things going on at once;

Advice to Senior Management

increase number of interns and managers; increase base pay and reward according to accomplishment ; provide more locations to work; don't grow too fast

Pros

Google is a wonderful place to work. New York office is fantastic and I love my team. I encourage everyone to apply.

Cons

The cons of working at Google are that if you are not an engineer, there is not as much flexibility and creativity allowed.

Advice to Senior Management

My advice to senior management at Google is to expand their teams beyond looking at what school someone attended or what their GPA is.

Pros

Great and smart people to work with
Good atmosphere
Great perks

Cons

Committee decisions
very large company
Too much politics

Advice to Senior Management

Take responsibility.

Pros

Smart co-workers, free food, fun work atmosphere

Cons

Unorganized compared to other big software companies.

Advice to Senior Management

Increase the number of project manager in the company.

Pros

Perks, benefits, good name to have on your resume, exposure to cool tech.

Cons

Too many people full of themselves, extremely flat company structure with little or no promotion opportunities, depending on the department/product you are working on.

Advice to Senior Management

Try to keep the good people

Pros

people
senior managment
career progression
pay
hours
learning curve
market leader
lots of opportunities to take on more responsibility
fun atmosphere
young

Cons

difficult to move to another group
heirarchical
needs more training for young people
secretive senior management
corporate philanthropy
worker benefits

Advice to Senior Management

Try to offer more training courses to young people entering the company. Work on having mentors for young people out of college.

Pros

Decent Pay,
Relaxed Atmosphere,
good work mates
good hours

Cons

hard work,
long hours,
sometimes there is a lack of reognition

Advice to Senior Management

Pay more attention to good work of employees

Pros

-Great food
-Internal transparency when it comes to what projects are being worked on (not transparent on things like promotions)
-Lots of stuff going on
-Always changing
-Fun people
-Great location in NYC
-Speakers and authors visit Google--great perk!
-Concierge team helps arrange discounts, etc.
-In-house massage (I will miss that!)
-Good for the resume
-Great place to meet future start-up partners. Cool techie environment. Learn the latest and greatest in the tech world as it develops.

Cons

-Biggest problem at Google = poor managers who lack leadership skills. My manager never once created an annual or quarterly strategic business plan. He (actually *I*) filled in the template given by management, but he never created a plan we could work toward. As a result, people did what they wanted, which was not always most profitable (in part because short term incentives don't align with long term profitability). This created a lot of problems. In 2007, the company created a new layer of middle-manager jobs and hired people internally...without training them to be managers! Disaster. Lots of inefficiency and broken promises. Horrible decision that continues to plague employees. There are some good managers, I just didn't work with any.
-No career development. Minimal worthwhile training. You can take a course here and there, but when it comes to moving around the company, watch out. Sales, Engineering, and Enterprise are silos---you can't move between them. *Everyone* complains about this. Smart people have for years been talking about leaving.
-They fired most of HR in 2009 (the others have always been contract workers without benefits); what remains of HR is really weak. HR is never helpful anyway.
-No one "owns" decisions (not even managers or their managers!), but everyone gets a say...so few risks get taken and greatness rarely evolves beyond the idea stage
-There's a lot of mediocrity; why improve when improvement might require you or teammates to work a little smarter or harder? Lots of resistance to change that requires more work.
-Flat organization is bad for people whose work shows skill beyond job level / area & typical promotion cycles (senior management encouraged national sales team to think of lateral moves as promotions...even though you don't make more money, get better titles--and then must start the promotion journey afresh as if you had never worked there before)
-Salary. When Google offered me the job, a well-known, respected web property with a similar job did as well. The latter offered me TWICE as much money as Google. Twice! And all the good benefits.
-Salary increases over time. When you're promoted, you don't make all that much more. Bonuses are small (and taxed at 50%). Options are not worth as much as you think. And you don't get as much stock as you think, either. (These are taxed at 50%, too, so you don't really get very much!)

All of this relates to the non-engineering side. I always really liked the engineers and when I worked with their projects found great synergies. Unfortunate the sales side made it so hard to move over!

Advice to Senior Management

Teams need better direction. Many managers are very poor leaders who don't make decisions or set clear goals or make teammates accountable to those goals. Just letting everyone do their own thing is a problem...especially when multiple positions have to support multiple people whose own agendas create conflicts of interest (and inefficiencies and tension). You need to give stars more opportunity to grow; they need more than just new projects. You need to actually develop these people. You know that salespeople are not the only stars or potential future leaders. You need to reward and grow more than just the salespeople. Because, let's be honest, many of the salespeople are not the ones growing the revenue. They get the credit, but in the end you lose some of the people most responsible. And they feel resentful and undervalued.

Pros

Perks, lots of smart people to work with

Cons

More and more politics over time, bad work/life balance

Advice to Senior Management

Google's doing so many things now that a lot of projects just don't seem impactful anyone.