If you join as a Noogler, you will enjoy the perks, free food, massage, infinite offsites, inter-grouplets, events, socials and meeting brilliant people and all that.
But the moment you start thinking of promotion or career role change, you will start observing this:
-- Extreme preference is given for manager feedback during performance review cycles. Some managers have no clue about the products they are managing, In such cases, employees who are more vocal and are manager suck-ups get preferential treatment during the review cycles. But engineers who make more contributions, are recognized by peers but who are not in “good books” of their direct management or a level above, get penalized. Google should fix this, and fix it NOW, before it continues scaling rapidly thereby scaling this problem with it. So many of its managers are managers just because they happened to be there when Google was 500 people company.
-- You will also observe that there is very little or no chance of career path advancement. This is different from a start-up. If you are ambitious and you haven’t discovered what your technical passions are, best advice is to not join Google. Google makes staying and getting stuck in your job very easy. All those perks are hard to leave behind. There is a fat possibility that you are stuck doing a tiny project that has no impact, no direction and you keep working hard day after day just to realize that the project is doomed to be deleted or has no future. Best bet is to get working on projects such as infrastructure, search or ads.
-- You have to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to changing projects. This used to be easier in early days. Now managers decide your fate. Manager can essentially lock you down for 18 months before “releasing” you to a different project. Google should never take its employee morale for granted, yes, even if it is the most sought after company. There are many brilliant engineers leaving Google, and these are also people with lot of unvested options. Stock isn’t a carrot anymore.
