Google Reviews

Pros

Very transparent management; able to speak your own opinion and have a lot of freedom in the projects assigned to you.

Cons

Hearing from them takes forever.

Pros

Great values, great perks, great career move

Cons

Internal communication between teams can be challenging

Pros

Fun culture and people are incredibly smart and passionate about work/life
Lots of free food (be careful or you'll gain the Google 15)
Flexible schedule (I was able to work from home when I needed to)
 Any time I called or emailed a passive candidate I almost always got a response.

Cons

If you get in as a contractor at the wrong time it's impossible to get hire to FTE
Not any training, still acts like a start up
Too many recruiters--we were sometimes stepping on each other with candidates

Advice to Senior Management

Career paths for recruiters

Pros

- Sets the bar for employee perks
- Work with some of the best in the industry
- Develop content on projects used globally

Cons

- Sometimes a bit too relaxed
- Lots of internally developed tools that can only be learned on the job

Advice to Senior Management

Can feel a bit fragmented internally among the various teams, and it is challenging at first to understand the various groups, their roles, and how to get certain tasks done.

Pros

Most well-known Internet company, many opportunities

Cons

Things get done kind of slowly.

Pros

Working with smart people daily, amazing gourmet free food, fantastic career growth opportunities within Google. If you don't like the project you're working on, you can transfer to a different project, even to be a different "type" of engineer (e.g. frontend/backend/storage). I work with people who've worked on several projects at Google.

Working on projects that you genuinely believe help make the world a better place, helping users connect with each other or give them greater access to information.

I like the direction Larry has taken the company, feels more focused now than before.

Very pro-women, pro-LGBT, pro-minority environment. I'm a female software engineer and have not seen a shred of the sexism or attitude towards women that I've experienced at other workplaces.

Cons

While not totally necessary, being on a higher profile project helps with recognition and career advancement. I work on one such project and have since I've been at Google, so I can't really say what it's like if you work on other projects.

Having a good manager (as I do) is definitely important to being promoted and getting put on projects where you can earn recognition. Not all managers are as awesome as mine and their reports suffer for it in terms of career growth and interesting tasks to work on.

Advice to Senior Management

Better training for engineering managers. A good manager is crucial to career growth at Google, and not all engineers make good managers.

Pros

Good infrastructure. Good opportunity to work on interesting problems. Good place to learn how to be a professional software engineer for beginning engineers.

Cons

Lack of innovation. The heyday of Google seems to be passed. Things are good but probably not as perfect as you might imagine it because the hey day has passed.

Pros

Free food and great working environment

Cons

The management und processes sometimes seem to be a unstructured.
The promotion process is usually very formal and inflexible.

Advice to Senior Management

don´t be too political when making HR decisions

Pros

Excellent benefits
Fun place
Extremely Intelligent co-workers

Cons

Slowly becoming a corporation like Microsoft.

Advice to Senior Management

Bring back the old Google culture which is slowly rotting.

Pros

It is the best place for software engineers. You can lean a lot from smart googlers. Also, meals are free.

Cons

MTV is in California, which means higher tax rate, higher living cost, etc. However, you may make more money in google than other companies.

Advice to Senior Management

In general, they are doing really good. I cannot think of anything bad about them. I like the way Larry Page is leading Google.