Google Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Google

Pros – Tons of career development, transparency, benefits, intelligent coworkers, exciting industry to be engaged in. Relaxed, casual and fun atmosphere. Lots of side projects that you can dip your toes in.

Cons – Too much ambiguity at times, relatively low pay, promotional structure is opaque and frustrating, engineers can be difficult to work with.

Advice to Senior Management – More transparent and clearer promotional structure and guidelines would be incredibly appreciated and helpful. Make sure there is movement in management.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Google

Pros – -Free food is great
-Great learning opportunity

Cons – -Tough to get new projects started

Advice to Senior Management – -Invest in new areas

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Google

Pros – * Great Co-workers. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive in this area. My co-workers are smart, motivated, and trustworthy. I can count on them for design and execution.
* Great products. Loving the product you work on is great motivation for getting up in the morning.
* Engineer-oriented. Product managers for the most part do not call the shots. Engineering bears most of the responsibility for design, timelines, etc.
* Flexible hours. Performance really is king; engineers have a lot of flexibility in deciding when to come in and leave.
* Food. Delicious.
* Idealism. "Don't be evil" isn't just some marketing ploy that insiders scoff at. There's a real culture of accountability.
* Stability. I heard of no one in engineering that was worried about their job due to the global economic crisis.
* Scale. You're probably working on something millions of people use. There's great job satisfaction in that.

Cons – * Limited upside compared to a start-up. You don't come to Google thinking you're going to strike it rich in one fell swoop anymore. This is the price of stability.
* Company has grown quite large. There's something intangible that changes with growth, and even getting to know everyone in your extended team can be hard. There are no all-company events anymore. These have been replaced with organization-specific events.
* Management quality varies. I have a great manager but I've heard horror stories.
* Your initial project is assigned based on expressed preferences and relevant experience. It may take time to get off of it if you don't like it.
* Ramp up may take some time, but don't get discouraged as this is expected. The software stack is almost all in-house and so there's indirect transfer to other systerms.

Advice to Senior Management – Overall senior management is extremely competent, and product vision is well articulated. Better training for middle management should be a priority. Proposed increase to financial efficiency (e.g., by cutting perks) should be weighed against the impact on employee satisfaction (they've done reasonably well in this area).

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Google

Pros – The benefits package is amazing, even if you're just a temp. Fun atmosphere, always a lot of perks, even if the job itself is boring. Coworkers tend to be friendly peers rather than smarmy corporate types, although there's a lot of corporate lingo around.

Cons – Long hours, plus I had to work occasional weekends and holidays - didn't have much of a personal life outside of work. Also gained 15 pounds. Great place to get ahead in business, but not if you've got different kinds of career goals.

Advice to Senior Management – A little more transparency in decisionmaking, but this is the case in all companies.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Google

Pros – great benefits
amazing people to work with
wonderful work environment
amazing food!
innovative work environment

Cons – Sometimes decisions are made top down with little to no involvement from middle management.
Although they have peer recognition programs in place I don't think management does enough to recognize the efforts of their employees -- especially their managers.
The extensive collaboration can at times drag projects out because everyone has to be involved and have their say in the project.
As a larger company now -- Google seems to be far more process and structure driven -- partly out of necessity -- but it has changed the overall attitude and work environment.

Advice to Senior Management – Recognize the efforts of your managers and involve manager in the decisions especially when it comes to initiatives that impact the people they manage.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Google

Pros – You will interact with one of the most brilliant computer science workers
Free food, free beer, shuttles, opportunity to shake hands with Obama and all the glitz.
Sunny state, beautiful campus, I even do my laundry there some days

Cons – You will face Software Engineering like interviews. They will test your ability to code and be excellent at algorithms and will be given utterly shitty job
You will regret joining the company unless you are a fresh graduate student who likes to be pampered
Pay is shitty as well except few lucky testers who get placed in "high profile" or "high demand" projects
You will feel like a slave
There is no getting out of it easily
I have a degree from one of the top schools and I am already regretting joining google

Advice to Senior Management – provide more opportunities to test engineers and engineers in test
they have ambitions too

Former Employee – worked at Google

Pros – the perks ad name recognition are second to none

Cons – It's an engineering company that just happens to need sales people

Advice to Senior Management – great place to work, but more attention needs to be paid to the sales organization.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Google

Pros – -Lots of cool people
-Lots of perks
-Lots of respect from business schools/grad schools
-Really chill place to work !

Cons – -You work really hard and don't make much in comparison
-Lots of people who graduated from the same school in that office

Advice to Senior Management – -Don't let the culture die
-Preserve your brand
-Make sure that you don't scare your top talent away through instabilty

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Google

Pros – *Perks
*Brand Name on CV
*Has long-term potential if it can become a real company and not a startup anymore
*Some really smart people can be found

Cons – Reorgs every 6 months regardless of departmental needs.
Getting promoted on merit is near impossible.
Zombie projects are the norm.
Lots of people trying to steal your ideas and backstab you for advancement opportunities.

Advice to Senior Management – Engineering is out of control. Too many duplicated projects. Quality is not rewarded, only things that ship.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Google

Pros – I worked here as a technical sourcer on a 1 year contract. Overall, the company is great - not much to complain about when you're getting fed 3 free awesome meals a day + unlimited sushi/smoothie/snacks inbetween. i loved how they allowed you to bring pet dogs to work. love the on site massage, oil changes, author talks, volleyball, etc.

Cons – no room for growth as contractor and management made many empty promises

Advice to Senior Management – didn't work close enough with management to provide input here

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend