Google reviews

4.4

87% would recommend to a friend

(48,451 total reviews)
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Sundar Pichai

83% approve of CEO

81% positive business outlook

Google has an employee rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars, based on 48,451 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Google employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

48K reviews
3.0
Jul 20, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

You will work with some of the smartest people in your field, and always have opportunity to learn new things. For the US it has a quite good corporate culture with much individual freedom. Compared to the Nordic countries in Europe, it's about par for the course compared to startups and smaller companies. Compensation is good, but is also geared towards keeping you at the office more (food benefits and various services etc). Privacy concerns are taken seriously; access to personal data is, contrary to popular belief, very hard to get. You will be able to play with aggregated, anonymized data.

Cons

You're expected to work hard and much. The "20% time for your own projects" is a myth; more like 120% time. If you're outside the US, count on there being late night and early morning Hangout meetings with US/India several times during the weekdays. If you're working in engineering but not as a software engineer, you will have a hard time getting good performance reviews, as all teams will value their own higher than outsiders. Compared to other companies in more forward-thinking countries, Google is about par for the course compared to individual freedom, but you still have have the US-styled meddling micro-managing bosses. There is great inertia in making things happen at foreign offices; things that were implemented in the US took 1-3 years to happen in Europe. If there was a tax deductable benefit that was available in your country but not in the US, it could take even longer to get it set up. The really good benefits never make it outside Mountain View. The workplace in most offices is really crappy; the norm is small desks (hope you're not sitting opposite someone with long legs), crappy chairs, people bunched up together. Unless you work in ads, you should be expecting your project could be shut down at any minute. If you work in ads, you'll be under pressure to make more money to the company. Even if you implement a change that increases company revenue by millions of dollars, don't expect that it will affect your bonus or salary more than an extra $10k or so - you've proven your worth, but if they pay you too much, you might leave to pursue other interests.

4.0
May 27, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Top notch employees - Campus is unbelievable - People are very approachable regardless of hierarchy - Perks and benefits are plenty

Cons

- No training. Must learn on the go - Re-orgs are extremely common. You never know what's gonna happen next month - Can sound very strange but collecting the desired data at Google can be challenging - Great disconnection between tech and non-tech teams

2.0
May 19, 2016

Glass houses

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The only pro I can think of from my time there was the perks.

Cons

Perks keep you from realizing how toxic the environment can be and noticing the lack of career opportunities. This would be different in the MTV office, but that would require 3 hours of commuting a day. So, unless you're an engineer, your only real opportunities exist in MTV. The Austin office's culture is particularly negative, cutthroat, and hostile to women and minorities, as most tech companies are. Management rewards only people they personally like and hang out with. Deviant personalities are punished in the form of stagnation.

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