Google Employee Review

I have been working at Google

Pros – In the right Eng group, young engineers will learn a lot. The food is good. The bicycles are handy.

Cons – For more senior people, odds are, you're going to be waiting a long time for any kind of promotion. You will also be way older than most of the people you work with, and your manager may or may not understand family commitments. (Google in general does.)

Your manager may or may not care about you. If you get a good manager, great. If you get a lousy one, it may or may not get fixed in any reasonable amount of time, and it can be hard to transfer out if you're having any difficulty with your manager. I had the worst manager of my 30 year career there, and should have just quit after I figured that out.

Advice to Senior Management – Emulating the secrecy, siloing and hierarchy of Apple will not result in Google being as good at focus and product as Apple.

Google needs to encourage lightweight experimentation (in a way that 20% time doesn't really do, since it's often "120% time"). Once there are a bunch of organizations who all want to prevent you from launching quickly and easily, innovation suffers.

Even line engineers, TLMs, and lower level managers are not in fact interchangeable, and the company (or at least the Sales organization) shouldn't re-org every few months.

People get promotions based on politics and who sucks up to whom, not based on merit.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend