- hiring practices tend to favor smart people who have no relevant domain experience and it can take years for those hires to become effective
- Extremely slow moving, with lots of red tape and badly outdated product development processes not seen elsewhere since the 20th century, at least on some teams
- These processes tend to stifle the creativity and problem-solving skills that the engineers on the ground have in abundance
- insular culture of self-regard. If it isn’t a Google product or technology, no one has heard of it or has any interest in it
- Very consensus-driven decision-making, to the point at which groupthink is almost ubiquitous
- This means that lots of smart people with limited information make lots of poor decisions when they get together as a group - the hype about data-driven decisions at google is b-s
- Also worthy of note, your experience outside of Google, regardless of what you have accomplished, will be ignored or forgotten after you start. You are just another number among 100,000 others.
- You will come across people who have worked at the company for 10 years or more and have completely lost touch with the outside world, yet are somehow put in charge of building products for those users in the outside world!
- many longtime employees, including fairly senior folks, have only really shipped 1-2 products before because Google is so slow — and are much less experienced than they would otherwise appear
- In short, if you have more than 8-10 years of work experience at other tech companies, don’t work here. You will work for people who are much less experienced than you and it will set your career back
