Google reviews

The company was founded on psychological safety, don't be evil, hire smart creatives, etc.. Today, the company has grown so fast and so large that now the majority of people seem to be typical tech industry employees. That means most of the management has now come from outside the company, so that has killed the culture. Psychological safety is gone, especially after the way the layoffs were handled. I miss Laszlo Bock; he knew how to treat the workforce. I miss Larry, Sergey, and Eric. The general quality of my peers has gone down. Not as people, they're all lovely, but as practitioners. Most of them do what we'd have considered low-quality work 5 years ago. It's shockingly bad, really, by comparison. They've all been hired so fast and in such an environment where they weren't properly trained or didn't have the proper background to begin with or haven't been given the time and mentorship required to become great (investing in people).

Prior to Google, I have had a long and proud engineering career. Passed the notorious Google interview and got the offer at T6 like a breeze. Was hired to rescue a big broken software component, without any a-priori awareness. (was never told so, before and after joining). Was promised to have 6 months of learning (like all Nooglers do, regardless of level), but by 9 months, despite tons of good work already went in with measurable improvements, was already criticized by the manager, f2f, word exactly: "do you feel it a shame that xxx is still broken?". Manager was a nerdy, self-eccentric, and ruthless "genius". Here is his favorite behaveour: in private conversations he says: " you are the TL, you should have a vision, should be the role model, and should lead the team". In the public, however, he does everything he can to knock you down as a TL! He would refute the comments you post on junior team member's code view, for very insignificant reasons. He would criticize & question your own code change in all the ways he can, making it stay in review for 2-months, without any significant functional changes (Yes it was working from day 1). Yet, he comes back to criticize hard your code velociy, citing the 2-month code review as a critical evidence! He assigns some one from a remote location to work on this component, without even notifying you! You see old teammates who worked on this component for many years leaving the group. Finally, you see your manager himself also leaving the company.