Google reviews

While company is great, your particular team and work experience could be awful. You could work really really long hours and pick up the slack for the rest of the team. Many managers hire accomplished and seasoned staff, primarily, to make up for their own lack of experience and knowledge. So you may find yourself without proper guidance, and in the position of a workhorse. This company is best for people who join fresh out of college and grow within the org....many others, will be taking many steps back in their careers and work hard and long on a job that can be frustrating just to be a 'googler'.

Google's tech stack is big and complex. You will be spending a lot of time figuring out how to plug together various systems and APIs. You may be spending a lot of time looking at various status pages, trying to understand whether your tasks are doing what they should with acceptable performance and why not and which obscure configuration option you need to tweak to make them. A lot of what you will need to learn to do the job will be specific operational knowledge about how to work that unwieldy beast that is Google's infrastructure. The code complexity is considerable, which means that implementing simple features can take much more time than you'd think it should. It also means it can take a lot of time to get to the point when you feel like you at least somewhat know what you're doing. The company keeps the copyright to all your hobby projects. They have a system through which you can ask that the copyright be released to you on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes they'll say yes sometimes they'll say no.