Pros
The perks: cafes, gym, perkhub, flexibility on working remotely, beautiful campus and allowing dogs on campus. The knowledge: learning first hand Google's approaches and best practices The experience: having Google's name on your resume, building connections with others and working at one of the best and innovated companies
Cons
You do not get all the perks. For example, team off-sites. It does suck when your colleagues are raving about how they really bonded during the team's off-site, and you can't really relate. Sense of connecting is really important at a work place, and sense you are restricted from having that even if your work excels your peers can't fully scope it because the lack of connection. You don't get all the knowledge. You are blocked from participating in Grow classes that the rest of your team gets. If you want to compete you must go out of your way and pay for classes, that your team members (sometimes) get for free. They are constantly learning and growing with ease and accessibility. While you're juggling to keep up, while being financially stable in this ridiculously economy. You do learn from your colleagues. Well, the nice ones but (yes, even at Google) there are mean and very mean people. Even management is mean. Not everyone at Google is Googley (that's a fact). Especially, once they see your red badge. Once they see red it is like the respect is gone. Some do treat TVCs as though they are slaves whose knowledge is mediocre and opinions don't matter. From my experience thus far, Google consist of 15% genuinely nice, 20% nice, 35% mean, and 30% really mean people. Oh, and the majority of the 15% are TVCs. My experience: You work your butt off and are doing the same work as your full-time teammates for below market pay with very little to sometimes no recognition. Your opinions do not matter. They only bought you on to do the hard slave labor.
