Don't buy the hype- Especially if you're joining as a temp or junior employee
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.
