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Average ratings from all users
Rating Details
Career Opportunities
3.6
Communication
4.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.1
Employee Morale
4.4
Recognition & Feedback
3.5
Senior Leadership
3.8
Work/Life Balance
4.0
Fairness & Respect
3.6
Overall Rating
CEO Approval
Eric E. Schmidt
Chairman and CEO
87% “Approve”
Details
“Do you approve of the way this person is
handling the job of leading this company?”
129 responses
(14 'Not Sure')
87% Approve
2% Disapprove
1 - 10 of 132 Reviews
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Jul 15, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
1.0
Communication
4.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
5.0
Recognition & Feedback
1.0
Senior Leadership
3.0
Work/Life Balance
5.0
Fairness & Respect
2.0
15 of 15 people found this helpful
Pros
I have never met so many brilliant people at one company ever. I have worked for 8 years in industry now. Seriously, there is not a single dumb employee.
-- Perks
Google is the best company I have worked for as far as perks are concerned. Name a perk and Google will beat its rival. Food? Massage? Shuttle service? Nap room ? Doctor? Offsites? Beer on campus? What else?
Cons
If you join as a Noogler, you will enjoy the perks, free food, massage, infinite offsites, inter-grouplets, events, socials and meeting brilliant people and all that.
But the moment you start thinking of promotion or career role change, you will start observing this:
-- Extreme preference is given for manager feedback during performance review cycles. Some managers have no clue about the products they are managing, In such cases, employees who are more vocal and are manager suck-ups get preferential treatment during the review cycles. But engineers who make more contributions, are recognized by peers but who are not in “good books” of their direct management or a level above, get penalized. Google should fix this, and fix it NOW, before it continues scaling rapidly thereby scaling this problem with it. So many of its managers are managers just because they happened to be there when Google was 500 people company.
-- You will also observe that there is very little or no chance of career path advancement. This is different from a start-up. If you are ambitious and you haven’t discovered what your technical passions are, best advice is to not join Google. Google makes staying and getting stuck in your job very easy. All those perks are hard to leave behind. There is a fat possibility that you are stuck doing a tiny project that has no impact, no direction and you keep working hard day after day just to realize that the project is doomed to be deleted or has no future. Best bet is to get working on projects such as infrastructure, search or ads.
-- You have to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to changing projects. This used to be easier in early days. Now managers decide your fate. Manager can essentially lock you down for 18 months before “releasing” you to a different project. Google should never take its employee morale for granted, yes, even if it is the most sought after company. There are many brilliant engineers leaving Google, and these are also people with lot of unvested options. Stock isn’t a carrot anymore.
Advice to Senior Management
Fix bad managers. Train them to be managers, monitor their management skills. Managers can make or break employee morales.
Jun 16, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
1.5
Communication
1.5
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
1.5
Recognition & Feedback
1.0
Senior Leadership
5.0
Work/Life Balance
3.0
Fairness & Respect
1.0
14 of 14 people found this helpful
Pros
You interact with great developers, original thinkers and interesting people all the time. Unlimited munchies are great, three free meals a day (or two in satellite offices) is great, medical benefits, partial subsidy of fitness membership, subsidy for ongoing education (though in reality you are unlikely to have time to use it) are all pluses. Being on the winning team feels good, especially when winning an uphill battle against an entrenched monopolist.
Cons
The days when Google was the coolest place in the world to work are gone. Google is deteriorating at the edges. Many managers at Google got their jobs just by having low employee numbers and are otherwise unqualified. Once entrenched they tend to show little concern for their reports, concerning themselves with "managing up" to their own manager. Google is supposed to have a project matrix where tech leads are peers, not managers, but managers commonly flout this and micromanaging is endemic. Moving between projects is limited by complex procedures and is rarely attempted. In satellite offices the selection of projects to work on is limited and to make matters worse it is discouraged for engineers to work on projects not centered in their own offices. Being friends with your manager is a more effective way to get promoted than showing competence. In fact, showing too much competence or initiative is a good way to earn the ire of your manager. Performance evaluation is supposed to be by peer review but in reality, feedback from peers is ignored and only the manager's rating is taken seriously. Political infighting and character assassination are increasingly the norm at Google. Managers turn a blind eye to it, perhaps because they have found such techniques useful in developing their own careers. Google base compensation is on the low side, and is supposed to be more than made up for by incentive bonuses, but these are largely illusionary because few employees receive the necessary "exceeds expectations" performance evaluation. Managers at Google tend to consider themselves special people, better than engineers. Few will bother to greet or otherwise acknowledge the existence of anybody other than another manager if they pass them in the hall. Except for the weekly TGIF cross-company sessions where the founders candidly answer questions from all employees, management at Google is increasingly secretive about procedures and plans.
Advice to Senior Management
Google engineers tend to be first rate but managed by unqualified, self-obsessed managers who were promoted into their positions just by being in the right place at the right time. This cannot possibly be optimal for Google's long term growth. Listen to all the voices trying to tell you this. Stop listening to the voices of managers telling you what a great job they are doing, because their main skill is self promotion. They don't care about the welfare of the company or their reports, only about themselves. From their point of view the system is working well because they are free to do as they please. The situation has already deteriorated to the point where many of the best engineers plan to leave as soon as their initial stock awards finish vesting. Google is increasingly becoming a great place to be an intern, and that is about it.
Aug 9, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
3.0
Communication
4.0
Compensation & Benefits
5.0
Employee Morale
4.5
Recognition & Feedback
1.5
Senior Leadership
4.0
Work/Life Balance
3.0
Fairness & Respect
3.0
5 of 6 people found this helpful
Pros
the benefits, especially the food and fluid hours, are great. so is the fact that everyone around you is incredibly smart.
Cons
i think google is expanding too quickly, and that they are letting in too many people who don't meet the standards. for example, i knew an employee who claimed that they didn't have any code to show for the past several months of work because their computer's hard drives crash, yet everyone knows that no one stores code on their own computer... there are version control repositories.
additionally, i know great people who have not been hired for random reasons. such as failing an interview which required coding in C over the phone...
Advice to Senior Management
change how recruiting works
Sep 1, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
4.0
Communication
4.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
4.0
Recognition & Feedback
4.0
Senior Leadership
4.0
Work/Life Balance
4.0
Fairness & Respect
4.0
1 of 1 people found this helpful
Pros
Good compensation, great benefits, great culture. Also, the fact that after working with Google, you can basically pick where you want to work next. Working on new and exciting projects (Android, etc.). Learning from the best is a great way to enhance your skills and develop professionally.
Cons
You gotta put a lot of work in, and working with so many talented people can be intimidating. Some of the people (especially people who were here before the IPO) can be a little full of themselves (but most people are pretty down-to-earth). Also, with so many people working there, sometimes it can be easy to feel a little powerless, and you might not have the same sense of personal accomplishment that you do with a smaller startup.
Advice to Senior Management
Keep it up!
Aug 31, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
4.5
Communication
4.5
Compensation & Benefits
3.5
Employee Morale
4.5
Recognition & Feedback
4.0
Senior Leadership
3.5
Work/Life Balance
4.0
Fairness & Respect
3.5
1 of 1 people found this helpful
Pros
Incredibly smart and talented engineers.
Great people overall: very passionate about what they do and generally very dedicated to the job and their employer.
Very cool technology at an incredible scale on the infrastructure side. It's a great machinery.
Ability to see all code and work on anything you want, at least as a 20% project.
Cons
Working from outside Mountain View can be tough: from late hour meetings, to generally having at least
20% less influence/impact than you'd have if you were in Mountain View, especially
on the making decisions side and driving projects.
Fair amount of politics and fighting for key projects, bad co-ordination between teams
working in similar areas.
The occasional suck-up and getting promoted if you're vocal. But I wouldn't say that's the norm though.
Low salaries compared to quality of people and hard work done.
High difference in salaries depending on where you came from and how good
you were at negotiating them.
Very unscrupulous at negotiating everything when it comes to money (from
salaries to anything else).
Very unscrupulous at using their brand and positive
image advantage to the maximum in such negotiations. They treat
you like you always have to give something up from your side for
the privilege of working with / for them.
Advice to Senior Management
Make Google a truly distributed company. Treat employees fairly when it comes to compensation.
Sep 6, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
3.5
Communication
5.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
4.0
Recognition & Feedback
5.0
Senior Leadership
3.0
Work/Life Balance
4.0
Fairness & Respect
3.5
0 of 0 people found this helpful
Pros
It was a great place to be working for straight out of college. When you start work there they really take the time to make sure that you're trained properly so that you don't feel like a fish out of water like at other companies. Benefits can't be beat. Besides the free lunches, fantastic 401k, etc, you get large bonuses fairly often. Co-workers were intelligent and great to work with for the most part. I also had a great relationship with my manager and thought I was treated fairly, but it can vary widely at Google. All in all, there's few better places to start off for a young college grad.
Cons
As a non-engineer, your starting pay is pretty low. It's made up through bonuses and other compensation methods, but when I went to another company, it was harder to negotiate a higher pay due to my low base pay at Google. It's also starting to become a big company, so you have layers of middle management who are just a couple of years out of college and don't have the experience to manage people well. Most were great workers, but many don't understand that there's a large difference between doing your own work well and making sure that others do their work well through your guidance.
Advice to Senior Management
Figure out constant new ways to empower employees to take risks.
Aug 20, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
4.0
Communication
4.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
4.5
Recognition & Feedback
3.5
Senior Leadership
5.0
Work/Life Balance
3.5
Fairness & Respect
3.5
1 of 1 people found this helpful
Pros
The scopes are good for future developments. This is a place which offers great opportunities to move forward in life. i get commendable help from my managers and other senors in case if i face any problem with my work. the work environment is fun filled and motivates me to work well and complete tasks within the deadlines. The pay is quite high. Moreover, this company offers very attractive benefit packages to all its employees and also many vacations. Added to this is the fairness in offering us promotions and rewards for delivering good performance. The name Google India is a good break to have been added on our resumes indeed!
Cons
Some of the drawbacks of the this compny is that the management is very unorganized out there. They are very mechanical in their approach and miss out on the personal touch. With the changing ways and methodologies of various operations of the company, I'm facing great problems to cope up with and carry on with my work like I used to do previously.
Advice to Senior Management
They should be more organized and arrange for more training sessions for the new employees to ensure goor performance.
Aug 17, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
4.0
Communication
4.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.0
Employee Morale
4.0
Recognition & Feedback
3.0
Senior Leadership
4.0
Work/Life Balance
4.0
Fairness & Respect
4.0
1 of 1 people found this helpful
Pros
The quality of coworkers is pretty high; nearly everyone is pretty bright and fairly creative.
The company is very flexible with its employees -- work matters more than hours and location.
There are a number of interesting classes of problems to work on that are difficult to find elsewhere [large scale distributed systems, storage infrastructure, etc].
The potential impact of your work is huge.
Cons
There's a culture of working long hours.
The company is becoming larger and larger, which results in more processes and less creativity.
Advice to Senior Management
Help your engineers with their career growth.
Aug 21, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
3.5
Communication
4.0
Compensation & Benefits
4.5
Employee Morale
5.0
Recognition & Feedback
4.0
Senior Leadership
4.0
Work/Life Balance
4.5
Fairness & Respect
4.5
1 of 2 people found this helpful
Pros
It's a great place to work as a programmer. The tasks we work on are mostly interesting and challenging, and the breadth at which your work will be applied is nearly unparalleled, certainly in the online business. The people are fun and smart.
Cons
The people are very smart. If you're used to being a hot shot, you may not be any more. If you're looking for the startup atmosphere, well, don't, because it's gone. You will still have more autonomy than a lot of other companies, but you will not have complete control over the project you work on.
Advice to Senior Management
Stop with the communism, please. Why is it that you always assume we can do things better than others. Outsource some of our benefits and return the savings to us in salaries.
Jul 24, 2008
Details
Career Opportunities
3.0
Communication
4.5
Compensation & Benefits
3.0
Employee Morale
4.5
Recognition & Feedback
1.0
Senior Leadership
3.0
Work/Life Balance
3.0
Fairness & Respect
3.0
3 of 4 people found this helpful
Pros
The food is the best reason.
Cons
Work life balance. You have to force yourself to take advantages of the perks. If your position requires you to constantly travel you may never get to enjoy these perks. On top of this, Google expects you to extend them a credit line of up to 2x your monthly salary sometimes while traveling. They take their sweet time to reimburse you.
Advice to Senior Management
Focus more on employee happiness.
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