Google reviews

If you work on hardware, then be prepared to be treated as 2nd class citizen. This company is extreamly bureaucratic. Since everything has to run by committee here, all the committee were run by people who’s only done Software and have no idea the challenge of building hardware. Getting promotion in hardware is impossible here. Nobody in our org ever gets promoted the entire time I work here. I’ve met some of the best Engineer here but worst managements and executive I’ve ever seen. Everyone just talks big ideas, but never gotten anything done. Projects get created and canceled so frequently you are always wasting time. It now make sense why half the things announced on Google IO ever gets released. Ad is the only thing that’s ever successful in this company. Food is free but very mediocre compares to most of the cafe I’ve been in the valley. Budget for perks has been going down year after years. DO NOT JOIN HERE because of their old reputation.

Google has a lot of bad managers. They spend a ton of money trying to figure out how to make it better, but the tl;dr is that at the senior levels, a lot of the promotion committees (it's an anonymous committee, not your manager, who decides) look favorably on managing people. Especially on the manager track, the size of organization you manage seemed to matter more than how good of a manager you were. In many parts of the org, it became impossible to get the promotion to the next level unless you had a manager who was really good about helping you carve out space to manage a large organization within their org. Career development is mostly an exercise for the reader. There's lots of opportunities available, but you have to go out and find them and push. Don't expect someone to guide you along career development. At the senior levels, you're at a huge disadvantage outside of Mountain View. And if you're in MTV, you're either suffering a huge commute from SF, or living in an extremely overpriced boring suburb.