Google Reviews in Santa Monica, CA

Pros

everything looks fine to me

Cons

almost no cons to me

Pros

I like the technology, culture and perks in Google. I like the fact that Google has many offices all over the world.

Cons

It grows to 30,000 employees by the end of 2011. and It starts to show similar problems as the previous big companies.

Advice to Senior Management

They should focus on our main business such as search, ads, mobile and make progress faster. Don't create more intermediate layers in hierarchy.

Pros

It is a great experience

Cons

There is absolutely no cons

Pros

-Great perks and benefits overall
-Smart people
-Ever-changing

Cons

-The hiring process is intense
-A lot of information - difficult to manage it all (ironic, huh)

Pros

Smart people, great infrastructure, cool products, vision clarity. Overal I was satisfied working in the company. People were always helpful and excited about talking on new things.

Cons

business decisions are not transparently shared, the 20% is a misnomer, you dont really get that much time, bias towards profit generating products

Advice to Senior Management

dont be shy to let people talk about things openly. the company has maintained a great workforce, but let them be what they can be. be open to the world too.

Pros

Challenging work, perks, enlightened senior management

Cons

Hard to get ahead, increasingly bureaucratic

Advice to Senior Management

Make it easier to move between projects, provide more training for engineering managers

Pros

The people, the atmosphere, and the food. All 3 of these are unlikely to be duplicated anywhere else. It is an extremely jovial and cooperative atmosphere where there are bound to be experts in any topic you may want to know about. The food is awesome as well, but this is well known.

Cons

Can have long hours because you don't want to disappoint high-achieving coworkers.

Advice to Senior Management

Although it is important to keep an eye on the bottom line in these tough economic times, it is also important to keep the things that make Google Google - the camaraderie, the smart people, the food, the technology, and the vision.

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.

Pros

Challenging, rewarding work found nowhere else. Without going into detail, Google offers problems found nowhere else in the computer industry, in many different areas. It's also pretty easy to move from one job to another if you find you're not satisfied with what you're doing.

Cons

It's now a large company, with the downsides of that. It's growing and experiencing a certain amount of growing pains. Unfortunately, some people seem not to recognize that what works when a company is just a few hundred or a thousand employees doesn't necessarily work when the company grows to the size Google currently is.

Advice to Senior Management

I think senior management is actually doing a good job, both managing growth within the company and dealing with the inevitable issues that arise when a company becomes as large as Google. With its growth, Google has become a target. They've dealt with this well, I think. They're also doing well in adapting to the political reality of a large corporation in the United States. _And_ they seem to have managed to retain their ethics while doing so.