Great technological company marred by bureaucracy and politics - Software Engineer Google Employee Review

3.0
9 Dec 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Salary might be high and various perks are nice. Depends a lot on the country / office you are in, though. A lot of smart people, computational resources and great (even if proprietary) tools for everything. The company carries the whole burden of your relocation. You have the ability to somewhat easily find a different project when you want and to move to that different team if you have spent 1-1.5 years on your current one. A lot of various projects to choose from. If you are not a white heterosexual male, you get special attention from recruiters, also numerous internal support and career mentoring resources are at your disposal, so the company might be a good choice in that case.

Cons

Depending on the project and the team you might feel inefficient of even irrelevant due to projects being huge, old and slow. Despite all the talks about fighting biases etc, your future to a high degree depends on your manager, who is often a great engineer, but with the upsetting probability might be useless or even detrimental as a manager. Your future also depends more on your ability to demonstrate your work than to actually do something useful, which makes sense, but the company does not do a nearly good enough job teaching you how to perform such demonstration the way it is expected of you. Sometimes you have to choose between doing something useful for your team or something good for your "career". Having to stick to all those internal proprietary tools (that are otherwise great to have) makes it hard for you to do much if you leave the company and those tools behind. You might end up in a team that won't be nearly a good match or might get a wrong role due to the recruiters making mistakes and then neither recruiters nor managers caring about fixing them. HRs pretend to be your friends, but make no mistake - they are not. They only seem to care whether you are a potential issue to the company. If an issue might go away as a result of them bullying you - they might do that, as actually figuring out how to fix internal culture is harder than putting pressure on people. The company keeps changing internal performance evaluation requirements, disrupting rythm of work on regular basis probably so someone up high might add "revamped evaluation process" etc to own resume at the cost of all the damage to the rest of the company. The CEO, Sundar Pichai, is great at photo ops, but otherwise uninspiring. The company's top management pushes American politics onto the rest of the company even if you are outside of the US. If you do not share radical left-wing American perceptions - either learn to stay silent or start searching for another job. In 2019 there was a big situation where a bunch of black employees and their "allies" were harassing a white employee for that employee being unfortunate outside of work to call the police after noticing a black man who acted as a trespasser and who refused to leave. The top management of the company in a company-wide meeting "addressed" the situation by pledging their support to the black employees and said nothing at all that would prevent similar harassments in the future.

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24 Jun 2026
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Pros

work life balance; good culture; smart people

Cons

could be hierarchical. GDM is difficult to collaborate.

4.0
21 Jun 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

1) Food, food, food. 15+ cafes on main campus (MTV) alone. Mini-kitchens, snacks, drinks, free breakfast/lunch/dinner, all day, errr'day. 2) Benefits/perks. Free 24:7 gym access (on MTV campus). Free (self service) laundry (washer/dryer) available. Bowling alley. Volley ball pit. Custom-built and exclusive employee use only outdoor sport park (MTV). Free health/fitness assessments. Dog-friendly. Etc. etc. etc. 3) Compensation. In ~2010 or 2011, Google updated its compensation packages so that they were more competitive. 4) For the size of the organization (30K+), it has remained relatively innovative, nimble, and fast-paced and open with communication but, that is definitely changing (for the worse). 5) With so many departments, focus areas, and products, *in theory*, you should have plenty of opportunity to grow your career (horizontally or vertically). In practice, not true. 6) You get to work with some of the brightest, most innovative and hard-working/diligent minds in the industry. There's a "con" to that, too (see below).

Cons

1) Work/life balance. What balance? All those perks and benefits are an illusion. They keep you at work and they help you to be more productive. I've never met anybody at Google who actually time off on weekends or on vacations. You may not hear management say, "You have to work on weekends/vacations" but, they set the culture by doing so - and it inevitably trickles down. I don't know if Google inadvertently hires the work-a-holics or if they create work-a-holics in us. Regardless, I have seen way too many of the following: marriages fall apart, colleagues choosing work and projects over family, colleagues getting physically sick and ill because of stress, colleagues crying while at work because of the stress, colleagues shooting out emails at midnight, 1am, 2am, 3am. It is absolutely ridiculous and something needs to change. 2) Poor management. I think the issue is that, a majority of people love Google because they get to work on interesting technical problems - and these are the people that see little value in learning how to develop emotional intelligence. Perhaps they enjoy technical problems because people are too "difficult." People are promoted into management positions - not because they actually know how to lead/manage, but because they happen to be smart or because there is no other path to grow into. So there is a layer of intelligent individuals who are horrible managers and leaders. Yet, there is no value system to actually do anything about that because "emotional intelligence" or "adaptive leadership" are not taken seriously. 3) Jerks. Sure, there are a lot of brilliant people - but, sadly, there are also a lot of jerks (and, many times, they are one and the same). Years ago, that wasn't the case. I don't know if the pool of candidates is getting smaller, or maybe all the folks with great personalities cashed out and left, or maybe people are getting burned out and it's wearing on their personality and patience. I've heard stories of managers straight-up cussing out their employees and intimidating/scaring their employees into compliance. 4) It's a giant company now and, inevitably, it has become slower moving and is now layered with process and bureaucracy. So many political battles, empire building, territory grabbing. Google says, "Don't be evil." But, that practice doesn't seem to be put into place when it comes to internal practices. :(

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