Google reviews

The downside of having all of this, is that you attract the worlds best colleagues. Seemingly you would think this is a good thing, and while to a degree it is (pretty much everyone I work with is outright brilliant), the repercussions of this are far greater than you would initially assume. Imagine the most type A, overachieving folks in your old college classes. You know, the ones that will literally go way above and beyond to do a truly exceptional job (chances are if you work at Google you were one of those folks). Now imagine only the top 1% of all of those people are in one place at the same time. Now think about what happens to the culture when you put all of those folks together and keep hiring them as your company scales. Suddenly everyone is taking on the max possible amount of work and doing the equivalent of 3 people's workload, and then that becomes the norm for everyone. And no one will ever complain about it because at the end of the day everyone wants to be a team player and never say no to a request, regardless of the time commitment. This leads to everyone working long hours, working on vacations, and even while sick. To make matters worse, your manager is probably the same way. Since Google will hire a director from another company and make them a manager at Google (because Google is so big a director's scope of work will be similar to that of a manager at Google), chances are your direct manager has the ambition of a top preforming senior leader. And while they are likely to be very nice (for example my current manager is absolutely amazing) , they will set your workload based on your peer's workload since the average assumption is that if the others on the team can do it, why can't you? Put this all together and you quickly have folks burning out left and right, and consequentially a very low average tenure for your team despite people loving their core jobs. It quite sad really because everyone I know in my Org is very happy outside of the amount of burnout they feel. Another important note is that it takes forever to get promoted at Google because regardless of how good the quality of your work is, you have to compete against colleagues who generally speaking are willing to do whatever it takes, and make any life compromise necessary to get promoted. Overall, I think Google is a well intended company, with well intended employees that sadly have fell victim to losing their own culture through scaling and hiring the best.