- Very hierarchical in both structure and style. Decisions from minor code style choices to team processes to larger policies are usually made by some group at a high level and uniformly applied to all, and enforced. - Constant reorgs mean swapping managers every 6 months or so - Incentivizes competition between engineers, which blunts collaboration - Very established ways of doing things that are in many ways frozen in time because of all the heavyweight internal tooling that would be too expensive to change "at google scale", as people love to say. Most teams use waterfall methodology. Long-winded, formal detailed design documents are typically prepared by one person and then handed off to the implementers. - Tends to favor overly complex code and documentation - The monorepo makes developing for/with open source libraries a nightmare - Takes a long time to get comfortable/efficient with the Google engineering ecosystem and its ways of doing things. - Cumbersome promotion process that makes getting promoted quickly after joining very difficult - Teams tend to be very meeting-adverse, which makes it difficult to feel connected with distributed teams - Diversity, Equity & Inclusion efforts are talked up all the time, but in reality, this is probably the least inclusive company I have ever worked for. - Shady ethics around the company's "mission" that everyone seems to turn a blind eye to
