Google reviews

Yes, the food is great and the 401k match is amazing. The base compensation is not top of market. I'd say it's average at best, but what really makes up for it are the bonuses, bonus multipliers and stock grants, which you get EVERY YEAR. That's right, EVERY YEAR you get more shares, not options, shares of stock which are currently above $550 each. Bonus multipliers when the company does well are nice. Everyone in the company got a bonus last quarter just because the company beat its own expectations. What has made Google really great are the brilliant minds that work there. Best machine learning people on the planet. Creator of the Python programming language. One of the authors of C. There are so many brilliant people at Google, and yet, the pecking order is pretty flat. When you start, you'll enter your Noogler class and be immediately overwhelmed since your class will have the top guys from Yahoo, IBM, Oracle and so forth with the same title as you - you'll wonder if you belong. Everybody you meet at Google will have been the best, most talented person at their previous organization. Somehow, Google has managed to preserve an open culture where people really aren't arrogant. I don't know where this "arrogant Google engineer" stereotype came from, because this is about as far from the truth as it gets. You will learn so many secrets it will blow your mind. The tools you have available are mind blowing. You get to dogfood and have your applications dogfooded internally long before they are released. 20% time exists! In reality it's never as sexy as working on Gmail, but if you have a passion, say, writing a MySQL client in Go, the new language Google released, go for it. Google engineers can take time to attend classes to improve themselves. Google invests a lot of money in career development for their employees. There's too much good stuff going on at Google to put down. I'm sure some of the other reviews will cover them.

First of all: I have an infinite respect for the founders, their ethics, the kind of culture they infused in the company and the continuous (positive) influence that they have on how it's operated. I also admire deeply Eric Schmidt, both as a motivator and as the provider of a very strong vision and leadership. The openness, the infinite possibilities for feedback, and the attitude to listening to that feedback and try to convert it in meliorative actions is something that makes me think I wouldn't work anywhere else. Of course no company is perfect, but frankly I have a hard time trying to imagine a company working better than this one, at least for what concerns employee lifestyle, work-life balance, career possibilities, open communication, etc.