Pros

+ You'll work with smart, hard-working people who care about products and the world
+ Build a great network of people who will eventually leave to start great companies
+ Work on challenging problems and cool products

Cons

+ Flat org structure makes it hard to move into team lead roles
+ You have to promote yourself and your work well to get ahead
+ Not as entreprenuerial of a working environment as a few years ago; more process now

Advice to Senior Management

Reward people who truly make a difference to the company

Pros

Great, engineer-driven company. Groups are all very autonomous, so individual engineers have a lot of control over direction of the group and responsibility for the success of the team. The company assumes you're going to be thinking about more than getting to your current milestone, and expects you to think big and aim for large goals.

I've found the other engineers sharper and more accomplished than anywhere else; everyone has shipped great things before, and they're eager to do it again. It's not surprising to be working with a 24 year old who sold a company, two senior engineers who were VPs at startups, and a well-known researcher in a particular area.

Cons

It's a cross between grad school and a hundred little startups. I haven't always gotten guidance from management about what's important or how the teams need to work together. Like grad school, there's times where it does feel all your responsibility. Marketing and bigger vision sometimes comes from the product managers, but it always feels like individual advice rather than a single clear vision of where we should go.

Individual teams have a lot of control over libraries and code they use, so lots of infrastructure projects grow as research projects that succeed only if adopted by significant numbers of other teams.

Although there is a big vision for the company, it isn't as focused or controlled as in other companies; there's really an assumption that the right stuff will bubble up. It's not a place with the razor-focused direction.

Initial titles/ranks and promotions are determined by committees of other engineers. This is great because you're recognized for your engineering work, but bad if you aren't churning out enough code or if you're not having enough impact on the rest of the company. Initial titles get assigned 6-12 months in when you're put in the same pool as existing Googlers who are up for promotion. If you don't match up to them, you go down a slot - no difference in salary, bonuses based on new level, and any mental scars from being judged unworthy. It doesn't really matter, but if you're at Google you're probably not used to failing.

Everyone's driven to succeed. There may not be a lot of external pressure from management to pull long hours, but folks tend to do it anyway because they want to accomplish something great. It's an easy place to feel you're below average, even when you've been tops everywhere else.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep helping us focus on the vision of what we need to accomplish. Do a bit more to centralize product launches so we can have a strong, focused vision to give to the outside world.

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

- tremendous brand value
- some top-notch co-workers
- perks and onsite amenities
- while salary may be lower than industry average, equity makes overall comp competitive

Cons

- at times consensus driven culture paralyzes teams and action
- flat organization means little opportunities for career advancement promotion after a certain point -- there just aren't enough senior manager / head / director roles available

Advice to Senior Management

- make people managers accountable for how well they develop and motivate employees
- people management is something that's earned and should be revoked if people managers consistently underperform
- give employees safe haven to give candid 360 feedback on people managers not meeting the cut

Pros

+Very collegial culture
+Awesome perks
+Great place to work if you find the right team/manager combination
+Lots of flexibility in how you want to design your objectives and do your job

Cons

-Significantly different experience across teams
-Very important to have a strong manager who is willing to champion your career progression, etc; often leads to situations where work is ignored if manager is busy pushing personal agenda
-Strong disparity in talent at international offices; greatly insecure senior management in some teams who wouldn't mind stepping over their team members and misrepresenting info upwards

Advice to Senior Management

Spend some time defining career paths
Make internal mobility across teams easier (even if it is to one of the "sacred" teams such as the Product Management team)
Keep up the good work of designing and launching breakthrough products and technology

Pros

Many smart people, very challenging problems, good perks, excellent benefits, very good free food, good cash bonuses and engineering ladder promotions for personal achievements

Cons

too many good management places taken by old per-2003 guys, no way to move over them even if you are extraordinary, little personal freedom to work on your own idea (it was the other way around 4 years ago), too much protocol,

Advice to Senior Management

give more freedom to people, listen to engineer, people who are bellow are not stupid, you did too many mistakes because you do not listen to your people

Pros

great company to work. Great enviroment. talented people. free lunch. can learn a lot of new things. work with talented people.

Cons

project is too complex, do not have own time for the research. pay is not high compared to other companies.

Advice to Senior Management

improve the project management and hiring process. improve the reseearch exposure to the research communcity by publushing the paper in the different areas.

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.

Pros

Spent 3 years there, fantastic atmosphere, great people and great leadership. Only problem was slight lack of work-life balance. All in all very good.

Cons

Work life balance was not always respected by management, plans would sometimes have to change with no warning. This was rare thought.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work

Pros

Salaries above average in Brazil
Fare bonus and stock options
Use of Google's technologies
International travels
Contact with top directors, founders and CEO
Great food

Cons

No 20% projects in Brazil
Few projects
Lack of diversity, specially in the leadership levels
Very strong hierarchy
Poor micromanagement

Advice to Senior Management

It's a great company to work, have access to great technologies but local culture is very strong. Employees may have very high expectations based on the company's profile in the US and get disappointed when get something different in Brazil. Apply Google's real culture is fundamental.