The good stuff is great, but the bad is worrying
Pros
- The people - you really do get to work with some of the smartest and most driven people in the world, who are also genuinely kind and eager to collaborate. I've made lifelong friendships with so many people and will take these relationships with me wherever I go. - The scale of impact - every now and then I'll stop to consider the number of people the work I do has the chance to impact and it's staggering. Google does not do anything small - it's go big or go home. - Continuous learning and development - the g2g program encourages googlers to be constantly learning and growing. I love that there is always some class offered that you can be taking to grow your technical or soft skills.
Cons
- Company size. This is a massive company and the size is starting to show. There is increasingly a lot of bureaucracy, promotions and performance management systems don't always reward top performance but rather who's been in line longest, and it's harder to get things done when you need approval from 15 different teams. - Google Cloud is growing fast... But they're sacrificing culture and quality hiring for getting warm bodies to fill seats. The culture is increasingly toxic and it doesn't feel like Google - with all the focus on external hiring in Google Cloud, it feels more like VMware v2 or mini Amazon and that's not what I signed up for. - Internal transfers are almost harder than getting into the company in the first place. I have internally interviewed for jobs that had 100+ INTERNAL candidates where they ended up only hiring two people in the end. I've also spent 6-12 months interviewing for 10 different roles internally before finally getting an offer on a different team.
