Google Senior Software Engineer reviews

4.3

89% would recommend to a friend

(1,542 total reviews)
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Sundar Pichai

64% approve of CEO

78% positive business outlook

Senior Software Developer Engineer employees have rated Google with 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on 1,542 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
4.0
Jul 9, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

My colleagues are great. I've never worked with such a smart group of accomplished people. The perks and food are also very compelling. The technology, rate of innovation and generally positive energy is also very high.

Cons

Tremendous growing pains. Not very organized in terms of career development. I've worked for multiple managers that were technical geniuses but devoid of interest in mentoring and personal development. I've gotten tired of commuting from San Francisco after many years. They also hired many managers from outside the company rather than promoting from within. Additionally the size is making the company less efficient as time goes by.

3.0
Jun 24, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

more freedom, relevantly less bureaucracy and harassment compare to similar size company. open access to code base, design documents cross all projects. energetic and talented engineers. free meal are very convenient. flexible working hours. core search and ads system have solid code base. solid infrastructures like mapreduce, bigtable, GFS, RPC etc are interesting to build application on. LSE are still positive models for the whole company. distributed offices offer working opportunities for people around the word. MTV main campus is dynamic and vibrate. company still attracts fresh high quality new graduates from top universities. politics is not a huge problem yet.

Cons

Company is getting more bureaucratic. While many engineers are super solid, some managers are only good at suck-up or manage-up, they indulge at meetings to show their influence but unable to really be a model and lead by examples. Some senior engineers are leaving as the freedom to work on innovative project is diminishing. more and more new graduate or junior engineers are hired. While politics are still relative small compare to similar size company, they are certainly growing. managers "promote" lots of tech lead to manage projects regardless whether they are really technically strong. peer-review process is partially broken as manager's feedback is the one that really matters. project transfer process is heavy and become very dis-encouraging.

4.0
Jun 21, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Strong culture that treats employees with respect and highly values engineers. Openness of culture that includes access to the majority of the codebase as well as regular TGIF's on fridays where management shares what's going on across the company with all the employees and can include sensitive information. Political candidates all stop at Google for a talk including: John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and many others. Author talks with free books.

Cons

It's a balance, but sometimes lack of structure and processes is a hindrance to getting things done. Flat-ish organization leaves less room for traditional personal promotion.

Viewing 1534 - 1536 of 1,542 Reviews

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