Google reviews

4.4

87% would recommend to a friend

(48,379 total reviews)
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Sundar Pichai

82% approve of CEO

81% positive business outlook

Google has an employee rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars, based on 48,379 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Google employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

48K reviews
5.0
Feb 12, 2014

The best there is

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

No company is perfect, but Larry and Sergey aim at running a great one. Free food is just the beginning, although parents of small kids will find it especially liberating to bring them over for dinner after a hard day of work rather than cooking. There are weekly TGIF meeting swhere pretty much all important confidential company plans are shared with employees and the later have an opportunity to ask any questions they wish to Larry, Sergey and any presenters. Quality of coworkers rocks. Managers are restricted to people/project decisions and do not interfere in technical aspects of the job. There are always parties, gifts, events and learning opportunities of both technical and personal nature. This is definitely a place where you can work 9-5 and prioritize family, school events and so on if you so choose. If you are a workaholic, you will definitely be accommodated. While the later group may justifiably receive promotions and pay hikes, but the former will not fired or mistreated for their choices. If you have what it takes, join and never look back!

Cons

Mandatory code reviews create a government like culture where people can "filibuster" something they don't like by just whining and refusing to approve the contribution until the author gives in. There is a lack of a single person or team who is responsible for an overall priorities and schedule of a given project. Separate control of various aspects, like feature, UI and code can stunt timely progress of a product. You have to be competent and self-confident to comfortably work with competent and often hard-headed people. Interview process is capricious and often rejects well-qualified and valuable people for irrational reasons, like "staying at the previous company too long".

2.0
Oct 31, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Most people are smart, lots of vacation days, lots of perks, good food, many interesting distractions like guest speakers, nap pods, good culture. Pay is decent, but not as good as elsewhere.

Cons

I'm used to startup culture, and I had a serious culture shock coming to Google. Maybe it varies somewhat by team, but from my vantage point, engineering seemed very bloated and bureaucratic. There is an obscenely long and restrictive "style guide" of programming rules that must be followed and company-wide banned language features that makes coding much less productive than I'm used to. Code reviews sometimes become bickerfests and can drag on for weeks or months. The allocation of engineers to teams is awful - my recruiter basically lied about what I would be working on, when I arrived I was assigned to a team and project that I had no interest in whatsoever, and there was nothing I could do about it except suck it up until I could leave. My coworkers were extremely risk-averse and were far more concerned about breaking something that already worked than about making progress. Also the culture is biased towards "perfect" engineering solutions, and just hacking to get something done is highly frowned upon. This isn't always bad, and you can learn good programming practices and discipline, but unfortunately it just isn't always practical in the real world of deadlines and needing to make progress. The worst part of all is that I never felt like my work mattered anyway to the success of the company. I worked on various projects that my manager assigned (there wasn't much discretion in choosing things to work on, and the vaunted 20% time is just hype), and my manager had a lot of "pet projects" that he wanted done but didn't really have any great justification for why they should be done at all. Anyway Google is a big company and managers and teams vary in quality. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are much happier than me, but I also think my situation is hardly unique.

3.0
Oct 9, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Atmosphere: the work atmosphere is great, you have fun with your colleagues and it's up to you to build the right atmosphere in your team. Learning: you can learn a lot, especially about the products (AdWords, Analytics, YouTube) and develop your soft skills like time management, productivity, wok under stress. Responsibility: you can take several roles aside from your core job.

Cons

Stressful: everything is about metrics, how much you do, how well you do it. You are compared to your teammates when it comes to performance review and you are told if you performed better than your team, average or below the rest of your team. The core job is repetitive and if you want to work on other roles you mostly have to do it extra hours, the teams are often stretched and you'll be on the phone 6-7 hours a day.

Viewing 181 - 183 of 48,379 Reviews

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