Don't buy the hype- Especially if you're joining as a temp or junior employee - Anonymous employee Google Employee Review

1.0
Jan 17, 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

1. Food and coffee's taken care of and its actually the most exciting part of your day apart from checking out. 2. Massively culturally diverse environment - you get to work with everyone from all over the globe if you're part of a regional team. Everyone's well travelled and you get the best tips for holiday planning 3. If you enjoy doing mindless tasks on top of your job scope which FTEs tend say are "a huge waste of their time" - you'll have plenty of that around and you'll be well paid to do that too.

Cons

If you're considering to take on a temp role or treated like 3rd class citizens by FTEs, this is what your experience will be like: 1. Some white badges have a serious superioriy complex (usually Google purists who have been here >7 years) and truly e joy to refer to you discriminately as red badges or "TVCs". You're beneath them so don't expect to be treated with decent human respect. Some senior employees find every chance to diss you for having lower standards than Googlers and remind you that all the benefits you have are extended to you because of their goodwill. 2. DEI only applies to users and not TVCs. TVCs must be kept hidden away from senior management at all times. This includes removing all credit on work you've done and letting FTEs shine on your behalf. 3. Expect your mental health to take a toll if you don't have fellow temps on your team. You often find yourself excluded from team meetings, team lunches etc - and you'll hear all about the fun things they get to do over lunch. 4. You wonder why they hire you to do intern-kind of work even though you've got 10 years of experience. Googlers with less experience tell you what to do because they always know better. I really don't recommend you to stay here longer than you need to because a lot of such work only applies to companies as massive and unproductive as the big G. 5. Watch your FTE friends coast- have nice work-from-overseas-breaks every 2 months while you slog away to keep the ground running. Yet, you're absolutely the dispensable one. 6. They don't like to use outside tools and everything is built in house by aspiring engineers who are tasked to make transformative impact. 7. Everything takes FOREVER to be done here. Global calls all the shots and they don't understand how things work regionally. You find yourself going round in circles. Things that take 1 week to do outside usually gets done here in 3 months. There are just way too many people. No wonder investors keep calling for layoffs. It's too bloated and I have to agree. 8. Extremely messy and bureaucratic. Kind of hard to imagine for a tech company that marketed its employee culture so well. For anyone looking to join Google: 1. Most important skill you'll need to have to survive here: Google slides and google sheets. Throw away your other project management tools. Everything runs on these 2. And youll need to keep track of thousands of these because there's no centralised system to manage your tasks. 2. Don't join unless at a higher level (>L7). Otherwise your influence is 0 unless you do well at influencing. 3. Great brand name to have for sure, but your hard skills take a hit if you stay long enough. You'll definitely hone soft skills though. 4. Networking here is so important if you want to ever get things done. Very extrovert friendly. 5. Meetings galore! Well.. at least they're kept short.

Explore other reviews about Google

5.0
Jun 19, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

WLB is pretty good i recommend.

Cons

most of time pay is minimum

4.0
Jun 21, 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. :(

3865
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All