Google reviews

4.4

87% would recommend to a friend

(48,390 total reviews)
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Sundar Pichai

82% approve of CEO

81% positive business outlook

Google has an employee rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars, based on 48,390 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Google employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

48K reviews
5.0
Jun 28, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great compensation, amazing perks, and incredibly passionate coworkers. While most companies will claim that people are their number on priority, Google is the only company I've worked at that actually delivers on this. My wife actually almost cried when she learned about the generous paternity leave policy and the "death benefit" provided by the company if anything should ever happen to me. It's overwhelming to see an employer go so far above and beyond just to make their employee's families lives better. I won't say too much about pay other than that my total compensation this year will be 2.5 times what I received at my previous employer ~2 years ago as a Software Engineer.

Cons

Sometimes it's difficult for people who are used to being the "big fish" at their previous company to get used to the fact that they're aren't the leader of the pack anymore. Work/life balance at my old job was slightly better, but only because very few people had any passion for what they did so everyone was out the door as soon as they hit 40 hours and never answered email after hours.

2.0
Dec 14, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Google is the best place to start for a fresh graduate. You can learn a lot here. I loved working on mapreduce infrastructure, the google implementation is years ahead of any implementation (hadoop etc) and learned a lot. It was incredibly easy to find a job after I left Google, my experience was valued very much by other companies. Until very recent times Google was the best place to work on new innovative projects in any area from information retrieval and natural language processing to large scale distributed system. The infrastructure of datacenters is very impressive, very few companies can give you similar resources. It's up to employee to decide how much time he spends in his office and how much time he works from home. Food is free and many other benefits are available.

Cons

Google management is pretty bad. Many cool innovative ideas from engineers were "killed" by managers because they were unable to understand their importance. Projects similar to facebook and yelp were made in google long time ago and they did not start and succeed because of management failure. Top management never understood importance of social and local until very recent time. Promotion system is really bad. I was glad to get my promotions but many people are very unhappy. There is no fair system to evaluate quality and amount of your results. Basically, everything depends on your manager, he likes you, you are doing very well, he dislikes you, you are in hell. Recent privacy scandals were very embarrassing for many employees. I did not expect my company to intercept wi-fi traffic.

2.0
May 5, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

* Opportunity to work with the smartest people ever. Having collaborated (to varying degrees) with quite a few Googlers, I can certainly say Googlers are "la creme de la creme". * Not only they're smart, but they're dedicated 120% to their work. (The 20% is for the weekends...) "Great is not good enough" for each and every Googler. * Fantastic development tools (Code Search, the code review tool, the versioning tool, and N others); * Opportunity to work on products that will be used (directly or indirectly) by millions of people * Amazing code base, superbly structured, continuously optimized, all at your fingertips. * Free great food :-)

Cons

* Very long hours. At least where I was, people would seriously work 12-14 hours a day (out of which 90% would be "effective hours", churning away tons of code). * Peer reviews, while apparently treated seriously, are in fact a half joke. Your manager is your God. You fit with him/her, you're golden; you don't, you're dead meat. Most managers seem at least alright; however, I apparently got very unlucky. * Code reviews. I have heard many a old-time Googler complaining about the pedantry. "Code review Nazis" are commonplace. From discussions w/ other Googlers, it seems the transition from "this doesn't break anything and doesn't embezzle funds" to state-of-the-art torture has happened over the past couple years. This hurts productivity big time, and given that you're still expected to have completed a ton of work, guess what happens.. yeah, you got it: you'll leave past midnight and work from home during the weekends to barely meet expectations. * The "transfer to any project any time you want" is an absolute myth nowadays. Caution: from informal discussions, it seems that I really got the short end of the stick, and that in other parts of Google things are much smoother. YMMV.

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