Google reviews

- Google is a big company. So there are going to be winners and losers when it comes to career growth. Due to the high hiring bar, most people who don't win are smart people as well and their experience sours. This place is optimized to avoid false positives in every step and false negatives are inevitable. At least when you get promoted, you can feel good that you have truly done something. - You have to have skill to find impactful areas or projects or start one in order to grow fast. A lot of people can't or don't want to do that. They want it lying there in a platter in front of them (I don't mean this disrespectfully. I have been there). This is why smaller companies or startups look attractive. It's easier to grow in a less competitive place and there is nothing wrong in wanting that. In my experience, a lot of people who say Google is boring and young & smaller companies are those that are good at building things and solving problems that a thousand other engineers can solve. They just want a place where it hasn't been solved. At google, a lot of your basic services and infra are built. So the problems to solve get substantially more difficult and requires some lateral thinking as well. Again, no disrespect. There are lot of people out there, including me, who would like interesting problems handed over to us. - in a place of this size, you have to navigate some political issues. - in critical systems like search, you can just push new things (rightfully so). It's a process and you have to convince that your feature can be used by a billion people. I'm sure every company would do this.

Disclaimer: Google is the most decentralized company I've worked for in the degree to which different groups and projects have their own work intensity, culture, ambitiousness, manager quality, etc. A lot of people I know love working here, feel they are working on interesting/important projects, and are full of respect for their colleagues and leadership. My experience, unfortunately, has been almost entirely negative: - problems start with the hiring process because they put up vaguely described job openings, don't tell you almost anything about what you'll be working on during the interview, and then don't make any attempt to match you to projects you might care about or have experience with. The implied message is - you made it to Google, so you're smart enough to learn new technology, languages, and skills as needed, and we give you so much that you should be happy working on anything. After working here for several months, my impression was: - self-satisfaction, detachment/cluelessness/apathy and arrogance are prevalent including at the very top. - too many of the company's core slogans frequently don't reflect reality: - treating employees with respect - actually condescension disguised as benevolence - caring about users - actually often dismissing them as a nuisance or too stupid to use the product correctly. - setting goals that are so ambitious that you fail on some - actually often failing on un-ambitious goals for non-respectable reasons - openness in communicating with employees - actually, most communications end up being empty hype and ass-kissing. - maximise efficiency and productivity - actually, even simple web front ends requires constant battle against unrelated problems with unreasonably slow or broken internal APIs, overly slow build/test/deploy tools, lack of documentation for how to use internal systems, etc. - fast-paced entrepreneurial culture - actually, for too many people, the main objective is to look good and score points with their manager - this is true all the way up to the VPs that report to Larry - hire the best people - almost everybody here is really smart, but the culture often brings out the worst most unprofessional side of people - taking risks and changing the world - level of risk I see people taking is changing the location of a UI button on an internal tool without talking to the product manager first