Google Reviews in Seattle, WA Area

Pros

Respect engineers in decision making.
A lot of mobility in moving into projects
Information open to everyone and transparent process
World-class peers to work with

Cons

The work-life balance is hard to achieve

Advice to Senior Management

Keep the openness

Pros

See your company and maybe your work in the headlines.
Work with some of the best and brightest co-workers in the world.
Work with applications that millions of people use and enjoy.
Great food, good benefits and bonuses.
Information exchange inside the company is quite open, making it easy to find out about opportunities.

Cons

Can be hard to transfer to a new project, which can lead to the need to excel at something you don't like in order to earn your way out of it.

The opportunities for 20% time are real, but you may not have enough time and energy to make use of them.

Management is often hands-off and not necessarily helpful/encouraging. Find peers to encourage and support you.

Pros

Nice perk, good compensation. Love the free food.

Cons

Little career growth. Bas Middle management

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on core business and stop investing into peripheral areas.

Pros

great work lot of bucks

Cons

no issues at all whatsoever

Advice to Senior Management

great work

Pros

Freedom of what to work on;
Lots of areas;
Engineers are highly respected;
Knowledge are shared across company;
Great infrastructure to minimize work burden;

Cons

Weak management;
Sometimes directions are kind of random;

Pros

Three excellent gourmet meals a day (free), and the best food out of all the Google offices I've been to (including fresh-baked cookies during ice cream hour!). Tremendous opportunities for professional and personal growth with several tech talks and classes every week. Every aspect of the organization is cooperatively engineered, peer-reviewed, and open to feedback and iterative improvement. A high level of respect is maintained between peers and managers alike. Consistently high annual bonus. Aggressive 401k and donation matching programs. Salaries are substantially higher since November 2010 when the scale was significantly adjusted upward.

Cons

They spoil us. I'm glad I worked elsewhere between college and Google, otherwise I might not realize how great of a place this is to work. I'm on-call for several services for about 48 hours each month, though the pager is relatively calm. Google admittedly makes mistakes in hiring, often turning away good candidates if there's any doubt; as a result, many smart people are bitter about Google because they get turned down--but I encourage them to try again in a year or so. And if you wear Google-branded apparel in public, sometimes weirdos stop you and ask lots of bizarre questions about what it's like to work there.

Pros

The free food is good.

Cons

The working hours are long. The pay is not worth all the time spent at work. Management is not great.

Advice to Senior Management

Less micromanagement and a better review process would be great. Also, consider hiring more people. There's enough money to go around...

Pros

stock is doing well so i am happy

Cons

unorganized no focus to individual efforts

Advice to Senior Management

get real - stop pursuing pipe dream projects

Pros

Free Food, Easy work hours

Cons

Never get to see my product make it to launch

Advice to Senior Management

Please, please, please pay me 10% more...oh wait, you did

Pros

Google is still a great place to go out and have an impact as an individual engineer and to have a chance to work with other awesome engineers. Management regularly makes it clear how important the individual contributor is to the company, and routinely solicits options and ideas from across the company.

There has been a lot of work on addressing past weakness with career development through more manager training, more developed mentorship programs, and more talks / transparency on the performance review process. This has been part of a trend in the company to stay aware of what issues are concerning employees across the board and attempt to fix them.

Cons

The non-confrontational culture of Google, though generally a perk, causes some issues. Under-performance is still often ignored or poorly-addressed. Interpersonal conflicts can become passive-aggressive.

Advice to Senior Management

Google is a good place to work and the devotion to continuously improving the workplace is well-known and appreciate. Though some individuals can be annoying, and most have never used the privilege, employees love that they can bring up their concerns openly to upper management.