Google reviews

In my experience, the culture is the exact opposite of what leadership claims it is (customer first). Middle management in the Ad Sales / Ad Measurement Consulting org seem to only care about 1) hitting their quotas by whatever means possible and 2) padding their resume with shiny projects to get promoted (regardless of whether those projects had real impact). Additionally, many of the middle managers are highly underskilled. All of this results in a strong culture of pressure to put mediocre work out the door at high-speed so management can pad their performance reviews with accomplishments. By the time the results of mediocre work come to fruition, those outcomes are swept under the rug and the next shiny accomplishment is chased.

Most of the senior leadership changed from 2015 to about 2018, and the new people are the most "meh" uninspiring bunch of caretakers I've ever seen. Above director level, leadership seems to only care about PR and cutting costs - nobody has any kind of product vision or the guts to try anything new. Any innovative product someone manages to produce gets killed immediately. Any new acquisitions get bogged down in senseless bureaucracy. The old leadership leaving triggered a chain reaction that's still ongoing, and has now reached tech lead and line manager levels. Most of the best people left or mostly checked out. There's nothing wrong with wanting a simple 9-5 job, but Google today is something else: it's soul-crushing how much nobody cares anymore, and how disincentivized you are from actually trying to ship a product for end-users. If you actually try to get anything done, you will be the only one, and it'll suck life out of you. On paper, this might sound like a nice, chill gig, but human beings are not meant to do nothing. The complete lack of goals or vision in the company will start getting to you sooner or later, and it is depressing. Consider: this is a well-funded business with lots of infrastructure and resources, and the leadership chooses to do absolutely nothing with them.