Google reviews

Senior and middle management lack vision on where to steer the group. If engineers are first-class citizens, and sales people are second-class citizens, then the folks in the datacenters are definitely the third class citizens of Google. Very immature and childish personalities. There is pretty much no growth as the career ladders are a joke. While the perks are nice, and the regular benefits are on par with most other large companies, the compensation is again, a joke (almost a slap in the face). Good people leave the group and either move out of operations and into another group within the company, or leave the company altogether as they realize there is no real career to be made there. Hiring smart and talented people and giving them mundane tasks and assignments just makes no sense. There is no real innovation to be created in operations, essentially you are a worker bee to the company.

It's just too intense. There is constant pressure to deliver "perfect" and scaleable solutions. Performance review is overly bureaucratic. Promotions are unfair: it mostly depends on how good your manager is and how well people know you. As a result, everyone constantly wastes time in pointless meetings and talking about their work just to gain visibility, as oppose to actually working. Risk-taking is not rewarded; you should not bother spending time on projects that are not guaranteed to succeed. It is better to land a mediocre incomplete product that will live long enough to get you promoted before getting killed off. The team I was on saw many of the most senior VPs and directors abandoning the project when they saw that it wasn't profitable, which is unfair because those at are bottom of hierarchy do not have access to these profit margins, but they end up paying the cost of the failure. Quantity is highly favoured and quality is silently punished. For example, I interviewed many candidates and spend a lot of time and effort to ensure that my interview reports were well-written and detailed, but I noticed that my colleagues hardly cared about this and wrote short and appallingly written reports. Guess which interviewer was shamed on? Me, because apparently I was "slower" than my peers. I want to say that the layoffs made things worse, but I'm starting to thinking that's not true. If anything, what the layoffs did is really just shred light on everything that's wrong with the company.