Google Reviews

4.4

87% would recommend to a friend

(48,313 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 48,313 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 Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

48K reviews
2.0
16 Mar 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The perks and salary are very competitive, you are able to afford a high standard of life for the country you're in, go on lavish vacations, and have a nice business casual wardrobe. The rest depends on the team you are in. Some people are genuinely kind, smart and friendly, some teams genuinely work well together, but overall it is a stressful and competitive environment, which affects people's dynamics in adverse ways.

Cons

While Google staff is made up of many interesting individual personalities, you often get the feeling that you need to think, feel, and breathe Google culture. Your individuality basically gets subsumed into this giant business machine, and good luck to you if your opinions, tastes, and interests don't match the corporate culture. Basically, you need to be into the following things: yoga, inspirational quotes, American left-wing liberalism, going to the gym, new techie gadgets, office fashion, blockbusters, Netflix, travelling, bragging about your accomplishments, money. You need not be into the following things: literature, art, academic pursuits, creative writing, alternative viewpoints, having friends outsie of work, aspiring to anything other than middle management at a huge corporation. All your time with your work friends - the only friends you'll have time to make and keep - will be spent conversing about metrics, meetings with your boss, and how best to make yourself look good for your next performance review. Your mind will be filled with these things all day long, don't kid yourself that you can have brain space for anything else if you want that promotion (and you will, just to get ahead of your office plankton job). The open plan workspace is hugely distracting and exhausting for anyone trying to do some quality work, yet is sold as "teambuilding" (in reality, it is simply the cheapest way to house 1000s of employees)

1.0
14 Oct 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The free food is fantastic, Google grabs attention on your C.V.

Cons

Where do I start? If you have completed more than 5 years work in your career, don't even consider joining this glorified telesales centre. It is mind-numbing work, filled with smart people bored out of their heads and quitely killing time to get the 2 year stint onto their CV. The place is full of politics. My line manager did not address me for more than one sentence at a time for the first FOUR MONTHS I worked there there. It simply was not going to bring her any benefit or kudos to be seen fraternising with an inferior. The arrogance of the place is pretty astounding too. 'You should be honoured to be working there'. My peers were great people, but it's the kind of place you have to be sure you are going to fit in, because if you don't (in my team about 20% of us) you will not last more than a year before slowly losing the will to live. If fussball, free food and a great social life is high on your agenda, go for it. If self-development, career progression, nurturing and supportive environment and understanding management are important to you, look elsewhere

2.0
21 Oct 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Amazing office space, free food and drinks, benefits, very nice work environment - You will make some great friends just based on the sheer amount of people you will meet - Good salary for a first job (not so much later on) - Targets are easy to achieve and you can have a great WLB if you know what you are doing - Easy to hide in such a big company, no problem to run off for a few hours and go for a nap or play PlayStation (as long as you are performing well no one cares) - Very interesting product with many layers of complexity. You can learn relevant product knowledge if you want to bootstrap something later on.

Cons

- Promotions solely based on something they like to call VISIBILITY. Useless projects get started all the time just to be cc'd on emails to Director-level and above. Those projects in most cases lead to nothing and don't produce ANY results at all, it is solely done for the purpose of being able to mention one's "great" initiative in the next performance review cycle. Another factor they promote on are several "soft attributes" which is a way for management to promote on subjectivity. - You are always told the company is a meritocracy eventho it is clearly not. This incongruent messaging compared to reality is extremely frustrating. It does not matter at all if you reach 100% of your target or 200%, what matters in the end is the above mentioned visibility. Another proof is that I heard managers say "Oh, he has been here already for 2.5 years, we have to promote him now" which is a joke and demotivating for high performing folks. - The metrics you are measured on in an Account Management role are only indirectly linked to revenue and are manipulated by the vast majority of reps once they have been on the job for a quarter and know the drill. Management knows this but does not care since they look good in front of their own bosses if the numbers look good. The best of the manipulators do not have to work at all to reach their targets. - Many of the middle managers are incompetent and have been stuck in their role for sometimes nearly a decade. There is no real willingness to achieve something great and make progress, but those people are just happy where they are in their career and spend their whole day wasting everyone's time in meetings or sending out useless emails. Very limited learning opportunity if you have a manager like this and very demotivating because no one wants to end up like them. However, there is the rare exception of a great manager. - Leadership cult, people of levels of director and above are worshipped through the entire organization and are treated like god's gift to everything. Some of them are admittedly great, some of them aren't. - Learning curve will be non-existent at the latest after 6 months and you will be doing the same day in day out. You can learn by yourself some new stuff with the great online training database, but the main thing you are doing gets old quite soon. - A lot of people drink the kool aid. There are quite a few critical people like myself in the organization, but a majority of people think they are on top of the world because they work in one of the least respected role of a prestigious company. People are not "super smart" everywhere, they hire basically everyone and it is just luck getting through the interview process. 90%+ of hires come from personal referrals since their CVs wouldn't go through the official channel. Level of entitled and incompetent people can be extremely high in certain teams.

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