Great perks, but they own you and it's driving the entrepreneurial types away - werkgeversreview Senior Software Engineer bij Google

3,0
9 jan 2015
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Goedkeuring directeur
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Pluspunten

Google hires very smart people and allows them to participate in the culture. This means your coworkers will likely be very interesting and fun, and you'll probably enjoy the office environment immensely. You'll learn a lot. The hours are very flexible and the company takes the notion of work-life balance as it applies to the workday very seriously (though there's a dark reason for this). And the perks are second to none. Compensation is also quite competitive as you rise through the ranks. And the food! I still dream about the food. It's a great place to build a stable career if you love coding but aren't super-entrepreneurial and don't make tons of contributions to open source projects (see the cons for why these would be issues). The workplace environment is often replicated, but nobody else has matched it yet.

Minpunten

The cons are flipped versions of the pros: Google hires very smart people and then puts them in fairly mundane roles. They used to try to take your preferences into account when allocating; they seem to do much less of this as they've grown. If you're at all purpose-driven, you'll eventually become restless at work, looking for something with more meaning than the project you're on. You could potentially 20% something, but that notion has always applied more to some groups than others, and the company has tended to downplay it in recent years. More disturbingly, there's a severe opportunity cost to your side projects: their position is that everything that you do in your personal time belongs to them, although that is not what the employment agreement says and would be an unenforceable position in California. They instead get around this by suggesting that everything that touches the web or mobile (and perhaps the desktop as well) is competitive with them. There's a committee that will examine ideas, but it appears to be moribund. Google has grown tremendously, and systematized to the point where it's a large machine, needing an increasing number of cogs to keep the engine running. The culture has been eroding recently because the company hasn't been able to reconcile it with its growth, and because the company has sidetracked from its core mission and thrown resources at "me-too" projects such as Google+. I predict that this will hurt the company's outlook in the long term, as most of its revenue generation still comes from relatively few core activities which are exposed to market and competitive risks. As it becomes less entrepreneurial, it becomes less able to diversify into new areas, and thus becomes less resilient. I would expect this to take 5-10 years to become apparent (the market would need to shift in a way that causes one of their pillars to collapse), which means that it may not be an issue for most people considering it now. One other thing I've found is that while they care collectively about their engineers a great deal, they're generally not very willing to go out on a limb to make individuals happy. Food and facilities people are the exception, as they do often take engineers' feedback into account.

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5,0
11 jun 2026
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Goedkeuring directeur
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Pluspunten

The infamous perks, benefits and the people.

Minpunten

A lot of red tape. Projects and approvals move at a snails pace. That's expected since we have 180K employees.

4,0
21 jun 2013
Aanbevelen
Goedkeuring directeur
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Pluspunten

1) Food, food, food. 15+ cafes on main campus (MTV) alone. Mini-kitchens, snacks, drinks, free breakfast/lunch/dinner, all day, errr'day. 2) Benefits/perks. Free 24:7 gym access (on MTV campus). Free (self service) laundry (washer/dryer) available. Bowling alley. Volley ball pit. Custom-built and exclusive employee use only outdoor sport park (MTV). Free health/fitness assessments. Dog-friendly. Etc. etc. etc. 3) Compensation. In ~2010 or 2011, Google updated its compensation packages so that they were more competitive. 4) For the size of the organization (30K+), it has remained relatively innovative, nimble, and fast-paced and open with communication but, that is definitely changing (for the worse). 5) With so many departments, focus areas, and products, *in theory*, you should have plenty of opportunity to grow your career (horizontally or vertically). In practice, not true. 6) You get to work with some of the brightest, most innovative and hard-working/diligent minds in the industry. There's a "con" to that, too (see below).

Minpunten

1) Work/life balance. What balance? All those perks and benefits are an illusion. They keep you at work and they help you to be more productive. I've never met anybody at Google who actually time off on weekends or on vacations. You may not hear management say, "You have to work on weekends/vacations" but, they set the culture by doing so - and it inevitably trickles down. I don't know if Google inadvertently hires the work-a-holics or if they create work-a-holics in us. Regardless, I have seen way too many of the following: marriages fall apart, colleagues choosing work and projects over family, colleagues getting physically sick and ill because of stress, colleagues crying while at work because of the stress, colleagues shooting out emails at midnight, 1am, 2am, 3am. It is absolutely ridiculous and something needs to change. 2) Poor management. I think the issue is that, a majority of people love Google because they get to work on interesting technical problems - and these are the people that see little value in learning how to develop emotional intelligence. Perhaps they enjoy technical problems because people are too "difficult." People are promoted into management positions - not because they actually know how to lead/manage, but because they happen to be smart or because there is no other path to grow into. So there is a layer of intelligent individuals who are horrible managers and leaders. Yet, there is no value system to actually do anything about that because "emotional intelligence" or "adaptive leadership" are not taken seriously. 3) Jerks. Sure, there are a lot of brilliant people - but, sadly, there are also a lot of jerks (and, many times, they are one and the same). Years ago, that wasn't the case. I don't know if the pool of candidates is getting smaller, or maybe all the folks with great personalities cashed out and left, or maybe people are getting burned out and it's wearing on their personality and patience. I've heard stories of managers straight-up cussing out their employees and intimidating/scaring their employees into compliance. 4) It's a giant company now and, inevitably, it has become slower moving and is now layered with process and bureaucracy. So many political battles, empire building, territory grabbing. Google says, "Don't be evil." But, that practice doesn't seem to be put into place when it comes to internal practices. :(

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