From my four years of working at Google, I've seen the following downsides:
* In sales, management level employees tended to be hired from MBA programs rather than be promoted from within. I was not personally affected by this practice, but I witnessed the demoralizing effect this had on a good number of very high performers who would have benefitted from a performance-education program so that their level of effort and seniority would have been recognized. In addition, as is almost always the case from hiring outside management, there was a great deal of frustration from employees because the manager was completely unfamiliar with the culture and process at Google, and this resulted in a feeling of being managed by someone who learned management at Harvard or Yale.
* Google "over-hires" people. By this, I mean that Google regularly staffs highly-qualified people in positions that are not suited to their level of education. So, for example, you would see software engineers being hired by support. That's just stupid. I appreciate the high standards that Google has for its employees, but I genuinely think they tend to over-correct in that regard, and this results in people not really being suited for the position into which they are hired. Sometimes it's possible for such people to migrate to other positions within the company to which they are better suited, but often this results in a level of frustration... mostly in this case people find work elsewhere, but in the mean time, this very necessary position must be filled by another hire, which then must also be trained. Not efficient, and not effective. Google also tends to focus hiring assessment on academic scores, which is entirely appropriate for new grads, but they do this even for people with multiple years in the field. That's just silly, and it actually does run contrary to the whole performance process within the company itself, where effort and accomplishments are recognized. Thus, it makes no sense to disregard this type of assessment for new hires whose professional contribution can far outweigh their academic performance by many years.
* Google encourages employee contribution to so many different projects that it is difficult for someone to get "deep" into a particular project and focus entirely on that effort. In this, I am speaking from my own personal experience. I feel that volume of contribution is valued at times over quality or depth of contribution. There is a sort of "check list" mentality where, the more bullet items you can point to, the more you are seen as a strong contributor. I think there should be more attention paid to contribution to items that are complex in nature and require more focused attention. for me, it's just frustrating, because I cannot live up to my own level of quality in my main project because of other demands from other projects.
