Google reviews

4.4

87% would recommend to a friend

(48,462 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 48,462 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
4.0
Jan 11, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Forget all of the fringe crap like snacks, cafes, massages, etc. That stuff is easy come-easy go (as 2008 has shown), and once the novelty wears off, it doesn't really affect your life much. There are better reasons: Overall quality of employees is the highest I have ever seen. You won't find yourself having to dumb down your project so that the rest of the team can contribute. Google's size and wealth give you the opportunity to work on global-scale engineering problems that few other companies have. It's nice to work for a company that at least makes a pretense of not being evil.

Cons

The lack of any coherent strategy can be extremely frustrating. The entire company just kind of wanders through the daisies as if at the whim of a couple of billionaires with attention deficit problems. Hmm. Let's buy some wireless spectrum! No, let's make a browser! Wait, let's make a phone! Let's make a wireless phone browser social network thing! That will be awesome! Be prepared for _enormous_ variance in recognition and compensation, between individuals and between projects. The sexy new project that doesn't make a dime in revenue, and everybody already wanted to work on anyway, will probably get the multi-million dollar awards. Slave away on ads for a few years and, well, you'll get the satisfaction of knowing that you're keeping the lights on for the kids playing foosball. Similarly, many complain about the "low-numbered" employees, which are indeed a problem. Why they stick around, I don't know. Their level of talent runs the full spectrum, but you can usually count on them having egos and titles to match their bank accounts.

4.0
Dec 7, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Google as a company has a great reputation, the products are innovative and often very fast improving. The colleagues are also the best colleagues I ever had - highly motivated, helpful and normally very clever.

Cons

Compensation is absolutely not competitive, even if you do a great job career opportunities are very limited because Google prefer to hire senior people from external.

4.0
Sep 8, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The prestige. What can I say--it's kinda cool the reaction it stirs when you tell people you work for Google. It's like that first time you used it, and got just the right result on the first try--very satisfying. Free food. It's great not to have to worry about feeding yourself, and the food and snacks are fantastic in New York. Smart people. If you're on the product/engineering side of things you'll work with some of the sharpest people in the industry. Most have stellar academic records and are just plain brilliant. If you're on the sales side, it's a different story, not that there are not plenty of bright, talented sales people. It's just a different kind of intelligence and not as prevalent. Cool products. It's awesome to watch the new products roll out, and to test them while they're in development.

Cons

It's become a very large company with a lot of the bureaucratic trappings that come with growth. Google deliberately has a very high failure rate for products, so occasionally you can love an idea or product and not see it come to fruition fully. It seems like the attention span is short, and sometimes products that could be successful are prematurely shut down. Career guidance can be spotty. They purport to be very concerned with career development, but moving to another team can be like pulling teeth. I think there are a lot of arrogant people at Google, but perhaps that's how every big, popular company is or that's how really smart, talented people are. I've heard it's worse at other companies actually which makes me terrified to ever leave Google.

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