The base salary and lack of promotion opportunities really start to wear down employee morale after the first few years. Unfortunately, there's too many glassy-eyed Google cultists/lifers who are willing to overwork themselves for a 35% (or more) paycut on projects that may not actually go anywhere. Despite claiming to seek openness, management keeps a lot of secrets-- especially around performance reviews (all employees are graded and rank-ordered, but employees don't get to know how well they fared).
In terms of actual productive work, employees are demoralized by having direction constantly changed. I suppose this is known as "keeping us on our toes." Further, it's tiring to hear every team say that they're acting as their own startup within Google, and that team members are going to be hand-picked to be involved in such a prestigious project. It's not uncommon for entire teams to be uprooted or replaced in one fell swoop. Put together, this leads to an uneasy feeling about one's job stability.
One final problem: too many Googlers are young, inexperienced, and short-sighted in their understanding of how much power they actually have in developing public-facing products. They don't understand the implications of their actions, and move too quickly to consider them.
