Google reviews

- Perks are great, but don't let that fool you - after your 3 months of organized training is over, you will be so caught up by the never-ending internal metrics tracking your every move. You will have no time to use the nap pod that all of your friends love to ask you about - SMB Sales/Google Marketing Solutions is seen as a "younger" organization within the company and within overall Google sales. It is very difficult to rise the ranks, as this reputation follows you throughout your career journey. - A significant amount of account strategists and direct sales employees within the organization are extremely unhappy. Many are absolutely miserable. The work is mundane and people are constantly complaining as the organization continues to operate across the same metrics, incentives, and programs that it has been for almost 10 years. You will not hear a lot about this, as employees always feel the pressure of saying that they are happy at one of the 'best companies in the world to work for'. No one wants to be the one who is complaining about problems at Google to their friends outside the company. - Perks, culture, and company reputation will keep you way past your expiration date. You will find out you should have moved on way too late. - The hiring bar has severely decreased as the company gets larger. Mediocre employees are hired based on industry experience, but have a very hard time ramping up to Google's way of doing things, and are often unable to keep up. - The process of performance reviews and promotions will at one way or another negatively impact you. It is one of the most dramatic processes, especially in this organization. There are long lists of people 'waiting' to rise to the next level in the company as people are ranked, forcing you to wait your turn in a slowly-moving cycle of burnt out individuals waiting for their recognition. People sit in the same role, burnt out and unhappy, waiting for their chance to hopefully make the next cycle's cut. Promotions lead to generous pay raises, but your job and experience stays the same in most situations.

Most of what you hear about working at Google is just hype. The reality doesn't live up to it. Shitty passive-aggressive middle management. Systematically rewards only short term results, which leads to exponential compounding of code cruft. I mean they give explicit instructions for calibration and promo to consider only demonstrable benefits of the last 6 months of work, and nothing earlier than that which had a delayed benefit. So the rank and file are forced to be like shitty mutual fund managers obsessed with quarterly results, in contrast to the upper management's supposed long term focus. When you start they flip a coin and if it comes up tails you are stuck in ads for years against your will. 20% time is a lie. 20% time is essentially unpaid overtime and if god forbid your 20% time takes a risk and fails you will be calibrated as if you had spent that time doing nothing. Every creative idea is shot down in favor of the same old safe but inefficient crap. All the projects come from the top down. There is no bottom-up innovation in ads because they try to keep everyone 110% busy with top down mandates. The company hasn't really innovated much in years. All their fast growing products are acquisitions or "me too" and the ads infrastructure is bloated and ossified. There's a lot of witness-tampering when it comes to peer reviews and stack ranks. You aren't allowed to rate your experience working with a person. You're supposed to somehow rate their entire accomplishment including stuff that you had nothing to do with. And if your stack ranks differ greatly from your manager's opinion of the latter they will passive aggressively hint that it will be a reason for firing you. Valve has a much better stack ranking system where people just rate their own experience working with a person and all feedback is anonymous. Also unlike Valve, Google has no freedom of association with whatever projects you want to do. It's all top-down mandates and selfish horse-trading by psychopathic middle managers. I've read about the toxic culture that killed Microsoft and it sounds very similar to Google in my experience. A lot of the managers were hired from outside the company and tracked their shitty culture in with them. Perhaps that explains it.