Google reviews

4.4

87% would recommend to a friend

(48,451 total reviews)
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Sundar Pichai

83% approve of CEO

81% positive business outlook

Google has an employee rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars, based on 48,451 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 Tecnologia da informação industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

48K reviews
2.0
Jul 31, 2009

It's hit or miss depending where you land

Anonymous employee
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

Free food, cool perks, 30" screen, smart people. Great positive environment if you are in one of the few projects with an excellent manager. Brand name: it will help a lot to have Google on your resumé when you'll run away.

Cons

Most managers are jokes and if you are not their pet employee will barely know you exist. This mean that on quarterly and annual review your manager will inflate the work done by his favorite employees and strongly back their deserving for a bonus, promotion etc, while having little to say to the committees about the value of your work. If promotions are rare and reserved for a select few, raises are almost non-existent and far below inflation. 20% time mean you have to sleep less and work more during the week and forget about weekends. The running joke is that 20% percent means you work 20% more time than the current 140% time you spend on a fictional 40h work week. Taking vacation lower your performance ratings resulting in lower bonus and less chance for a promotion or raise. Same goes for sick days, parental leave, or even for being unreachable on a weekend (while not on call). Some of my coworkers had to complain to HR about their managers and got little support. HR would not recognize any wrongdoing and downplay issues as personality mismatch and misunderstandings. I've witnessed situations unblock with HR only after a VP was contacted for help by the employee.

1.0
May 23, 2009
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

2 types of people that will find a great place to work: (1) recent college or B-school graduates looking for a first job where they can learn a lot, and (2) more senior corporate executives with many years of experience who aren't overly ambitious and are looking for a role where they can put life on auto-pilot and glide through their day-to-day activities.

Cons

There is no clear career progression, and management is arrogant.

2.0
May 5, 2009
Recommend
Business Outlook

Pros

* Opportunity to work with the smartest people ever. Having collaborated (to varying degrees) with quite a few Googlers, I can certainly say Googlers are "la creme de la creme". * Not only they're smart, but they're dedicated 120% to their work. (The 20% is for the weekends...) "Great is not good enough" for each and every Googler. * Fantastic development tools (Code Search, the code review tool, the versioning tool, and N others); * Opportunity to work on products that will be used (directly or indirectly) by millions of people * Amazing code base, superbly structured, continuously optimized, all at your fingertips. * Free great food :-)

Cons

* Very long hours. At least where I was, people would seriously work 12-14 hours a day (out of which 90% would be "effective hours", churning away tons of code). * Peer reviews, while apparently treated seriously, are in fact a half joke. Your manager is your God. You fit with him/her, you're golden; you don't, you're dead meat. Most managers seem at least alright; however, I apparently got very unlucky. * Code reviews. I have heard many a old-time Googler complaining about the pedantry. "Code review Nazis" are commonplace. From discussions w/ other Googlers, it seems the transition from "this doesn't break anything and doesn't embezzle funds" to state-of-the-art torture has happened over the past couple years. This hurts productivity big time, and given that you're still expected to have completed a ton of work, guess what happens.. yeah, you got it: you'll leave past midnight and work from home during the weekends to barely meet expectations. * The "transfer to any project any time you want" is an absolute myth nowadays. Caution: from informal discussions, it seems that I really got the short end of the stick, and that in other parts of Google things are much smoother. YMMV.

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