Google reviews

- Competition is fierce. Everyone is striving for limited promotions and visibility, and that leads to people sabotaging or just not helping each other. - Managers are powerful. If yours doesn't want you to succeed, they have a great deal of control over your future at the company. - Switching teams is not as easy as advertised. Honestly, applying to Google from the outside is easier than trying to join a new team. If your manager doesn't want you to switch teams, you will not switch teams. - HR will not help you if a problematic situation happens. They are there to protect the company. While nice individuals, they will happily tell you untrue information to help Google and hurt you. - Promotion culture is insidious. Everyone is trying to get promoted to make more money, and the system around promotion encourages the wrong kinds of risk-taking: bold but useless new products, hoarding credit, blaming others for your mistakes. - If a product is at risk, one or two people may be collectively blamed to save the whole. I saw this happen multiple times. A deadline is missed, so an agreement is hatched the the problem was person X or person Y. That way, person X or Y can be fired and the others promoted because they made progress despite working with someone as lowly as X or Y. - Fakeness. Individuals at Google are largely wonderful, but the company encourages you to keep and tow the line. Smile. Be Googley. Pretend we're all collaborating openly. But, in the back of everyone's mind is their career path, their promo, and how other people can be used to get them there or discarded if they do not. - A few PMs and manager are very poor performers and their teams suffer as a result. Many PMs and managers are wonderful. It depends on the team you get, which is largely a question of luck. - A culture which somewhat coddles through its benefits leads some to stay dependent and socially immature, especially if joined right out of college.

- Promotions solely based on something they like to call VISIBILITY. Useless projects get started all the time just to be cc'd on emails to Director-level and above. Those projects in most cases lead to nothing and don't produce ANY results at all, it is solely done for the purpose of being able to mention one's "great" initiative in the next performance review cycle. Another factor they promote on are several "soft attributes" which is a way for management to promote on subjectivity. - You are always told the company is a meritocracy eventho it is clearly not. This incongruent messaging compared to reality is extremely frustrating. It does not matter at all if you reach 100% of your target or 200%, what matters in the end is the above mentioned visibility. Another proof is that I heard managers say "Oh, he has been here already for 2.5 years, we have to promote him now" which is a joke and demotivating for high performing folks. - The metrics you are measured on in an Account Management role are only indirectly linked to revenue and are manipulated by the vast majority of reps once they have been on the job for a quarter and know the drill. Management knows this but does not care since they look good in front of their own bosses if the numbers look good. The best of the manipulators do not have to work at all to reach their targets. - Many of the middle managers are incompetent and have been stuck in their role for sometimes nearly a decade. There is no real willingness to achieve something great and make progress, but those people are just happy where they are in their career and spend their whole day wasting everyone's time in meetings or sending out useless emails. Very limited learning opportunity if you have a manager like this and very demotivating because no one wants to end up like them. However, there is the rare exception of a great manager. - Leadership cult, people of levels of director and above are worshipped through the entire organization and are treated like god's gift to everything. Some of them are admittedly great, some of them aren't. - Learning curve will be non-existent at the latest after 6 months and you will be doing the same day in day out. You can learn by yourself some new stuff with the great online training database, but the main thing you are doing gets old quite soon. - A lot of people drink the kool aid. There are quite a few critical people like myself in the organization, but a majority of people think they are on top of the world because they work in one of the least respected role of a prestigious company. People are not "super smart" everywhere, they hire basically everyone and it is just luck getting through the interview process. 90%+ of hires come from personal referrals since their CVs wouldn't go through the official channel. Level of entitled and incompetent people can be extremely high in certain teams.