Google reviews

The global business org at Google struggles with its flat organizational structure; it can be difficult to get promoted or to have your work acknowledged in a very competitive, self-promoting culture. Don't believe everything you read in the press about how fantastic Google work culture is. Although the HR department has made multiple attempts to improve the promotion structure at Google, it can be near impossible to navigate all of the appropriate politics to gain a promotion. Furthermore, a promotion in the sales org at Google does not necessarily mean an increase in responsibility or a title change. Employees usually work in roles 1-2 levels above them in order to first demonstrate that they are worthy of promotion. In this same vein, the opportunities for growth are VERY few within this org, and you often find people moving from industry to industry (within the sales org) to keep their day-to-day interesting. There is a huge bottleneck for middle management to make their way into leadership positions. Most importantly, the leadership within the sales org is severely lacking. Leadership makes decisions well removed from the sales organization itself (and its employees) and often work like politicians to further their own careers, rather than improve the larger organization itself.

If you are a software engineer (SWE), I don't recommend joining the Site reliability engineering (SRE) team because Google SRE management is clueless and plays favoritism. You will be responsible for both SRE works and software developments. Your software development skills will be judged by developers in feature teams because you were in a SRE team. The goal of Google SRE management is to get you do SRE works and then eventually screwing your career and promote fellow SREs.