Google Senior Software Engineer reviews

4.3

89% would recommend to a friend

(1,544 total reviews)
avatar

Sundar Pichai

63% approve of CEO

78% positive business outlook

Senior Software Developer Engineer employees have rated Google with 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on 1,544 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Senior Software Developer Engineer professionals have an excellent working experience there. Google is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Senior Software Developer Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
5.0
Mar 5, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Work is challenging, fun, touches a lot of people. The scale of what Google does is mind-boggling. It's rewarding to know that your code is being executed millions of times a day when people use Google's products. Perks and pay are awesome. Equity you get in form of restricted stock units are growing in value by leaps and bounds. Lots of flexibility in work/life balance (I work from home one day a week to avoid the SF->Mountain View commute). Google culture is liberal, creative, and welcoming. If you have good ideas, people want to hear them even if you aren't senior.

Cons

Commute is terrible if you live in San Francisco and work in Mountain View. May be less fun and rewarding if you aren't on an interesting team/product. In a huge company, some people find they have difficulty feeling like they're making an impact.

5.0
Feb 26, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

We work with some of the smartest, most ambitious, and intelligent people around. The problems that we tackle are have great impact worldwide. The work is incredibly challenging and interesting. We're constantly told to think bigger. We really are trying to change the world. We have a great amount of resources at our fingertips. With a couple of commands, I can run a service on thousands of machines worldwide. We have access to pretty much what we need to do our job. Because Google is involved in a large number of industries, there are plenty of opportunities abound to find something that you're interested in. We are highly encouraged to move around the company. The company really takes care of us professionally and personally. The benefits are incredibly high. My team has been on offsites to Tahoe, Vegas, and Hawaii in the last year. The company creates an environment where you don't really want to leave campus. Lastly, being on the inside and seeing all of the technology before it launches is really like seeing the future. Some of the unannounced products that we're working on is science fiction.

Cons

There are many projects that get rejected or shutdown because they aren't Google-scale. Any of these projects that gets rejected would be really successful if it was created by a startup. This also means that the bar for launch is much higher. Google is no longer a startup. It is hard to move fast. We try to balance creating innovative products and a consistent user experience that makes it hard to move quickly as you end up spending a lot of time trying to integrate into existing products. You are working with incredibly intelligent and incredibly ambitious people. This makes the environment a bit competitive and people focused on what gets them ahead.

5.0
Jan 16, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The cutting edge tech infrastructure is a playground for any software engineer, and the absolute best stack you could imagine working with. The work environment is very entrepreneurial, and the compensation is easily and quickly adjusted for good performance. And of course, the food is excellent :)

Cons

The culture can be a little inward-looking IMO, also many employees are unprofessional and/or rude on internal communication channels. The company (and internet advertising in general) seems to get a bad rap from external parties this days, which I believe is undeserved. We seem to do a bad job controlling perception of the Google brand.

Viewing 1465 - 1467 of 1,544 Reviews

Glassdoor has 70,268 Google reviews submitted anonymously by Google employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Google is right for you.