Google Senior Software Engineer reviews

The hiring bar is very slowly lowering. "20% time" is generally a myth. Internally we called it "120% time". Google's increasing scale is causing problems. Some parts of infrastructure are so complex that no one can see the whole picture. Duplicated work and missed requirements happen a lot. As the machine grows larger and there are more parts, the scope of individual responsibility moves further from having real customer impact. Also I disagree with the high level direction of the company. In the last few years senior management has developed and worsened a trend of killing or crippling beloved products. Strategy is never transparent, even as the company maintains that they value transparency. Overall it feels that while engineering decisions are data-driven, management decisions are not. There has been a focus on growth, at the expense of innovation.

It's become a corporation. Sometimes it's hard to feel you can make a huge impact. There's so many employees and projects, you can be gone for weeks and nobody will notice.