Google reviews

4.4

87% would recommend to a friend

(48,420 total reviews)
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Sundar Pichai

83% approve of CEO

81% positive business outlook

Google has an employee rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars, based on 48,420 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
Feb 19, 2011
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Three excellent gourmet meals a day (free), and the best food out of all the Google offices I've been to (including fresh-baked cookies during ice cream hour!). Tremendous opportunities for professional and personal growth with several tech talks and classes every week. Every aspect of the organization is cooperatively engineered, peer-reviewed, and open to feedback and iterative improvement. A high level of respect is maintained between peers and managers alike. Consistently high annual bonus. Aggressive 401k and donation matching programs. Salaries are substantially higher since November 2010 when the scale was significantly adjusted upward.

Cons

They spoil us. I'm glad I worked elsewhere between college and Google, otherwise I might not realize how great of a place this is to work. I'm on-call for several services for about 48 hours each month, though the pager is relatively calm. Google admittedly makes mistakes in hiring, often turning away good candidates if there's any doubt; as a result, many smart people are bitter about Google because they get turned down--but I encourage them to try again in a year or so. And if you wear Google-branded apparel in public, sometimes weirdos stop you and ask lots of bizarre questions about what it's like to work there.

5.0
Oct 3, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Coming out of college, I think Google provides a huge opportunity to advance quickly, but to a point. You'll be given considerable responsibility, and paid accordingly with some pretty terrific perks.

Cons

Google is fighting the 'law of large companies', and is doing pretty well but there's a certain inevitability afoot too: Over the four years I've been there, I've noticed scaling back of perks (and also at times a sickening culture of employee entitlement), a steady rise of red tape to run a scalable service in the production environment, a certain amount of stiff corporate speak and a uptightness over branding, image, and in some cases (though definitely not all) an aversion to risk taking has to some extent dampened my enthusiasm a little bit. Still an amazing place to be though.

4.0
Dec 5, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

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.

Cons

It could suck for you if you are not a developer. If you are a developer, you never have to worry about things like squeezing out money from your products, but if you're anyone else the pressure is constantly on. The Mountain View office has the best vibe, and this vibe is missing from the other offices. Honestly, I don't care about this one but not all the fringe perks are as good as the media makes it out to be. Massages aren't free, you have to earn credits. You get one a year on your birthday and these are often given out as prizes for internal contests. Dry cleaning isn't free. Etc. You will be too busy to take advantage of all the perks. Base compensation is not great, but Google rarely lays people off. Google hires people that want to do a good job, so this isn't a place where if you have a bad quarter you are gone. You simply may be passed up for bonus, which will suck.

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