Google reviews

4.4

87% would recommend to a friend

(48,428 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 48,428 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
4.0
Mar 20, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great pay and it just comes with performance and promotions, you don't need to negotiate it. You get the chance to work with and learn from some amazing people. Very high code quality, not just at the level of coding style or individual classes, but the overall system architecture, things tend to be really thought through, stupid things don't happen. The company is very helpful with immigration issues. Good 401k program.

Cons

Google's tech stack is big and complex. You will be spending a lot of time figuring out how to plug together various systems and APIs. You may be spending a lot of time looking at various status pages, trying to understand whether your tasks are doing what they should with acceptable performance and why not and which obscure configuration option you need to tweak to make them. A lot of what you will need to learn to do the job will be specific operational knowledge about how to work that unwieldy beast that is Google's infrastructure. The code complexity is considerable, which means that implementing simple features can take much more time than you'd think it should. It also means it can take a lot of time to get to the point when you feel like you at least somewhat know what you're doing. The company keeps the copyright to all your hobby projects. They have a system through which you can ask that the copyright be released to you on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes they'll say yes sometimes they'll say no.

2.0
Jul 24, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Benefits are good. Shuttle transportation can be useful for many people. Occasionally there are interesting talks (but conference rooms are often way too tiny.)

Cons

The interviews are really bad for the applicant: you learn nothing from what you will be doing and are interviewed only by people from completely different areas of expertise than yours. If you decide to come here, expect to have 5-6 layers of management above you. Unless your are a big shot or manage to get a strong ally, you often get the promise of leading some significant project, only to be exchanged without notice with more "experienced" people. Only a minority of engineers get to do the interesting stuff: Google+, Knowledge Graph, etc. If you are part of the other 99%, things are less exciting and the lower your rank is, the less freedom you have.

3.0
Mar 29, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I began at Google pre-IPO so my experience is based on the way the company evolved over time from a smallish company of less than 600 employees, to the tens of thousands that work there today. Google is, as expected, an incredible place to work. Your colleagues will be brilliant and the work environment is world-class. The projects are interesting and there is the constant state of wonder you will get when seeing work you completed actually deployed, and used, by people all over the world. On top of that, the company allows for incredible personal development, both professionally and with regards to non-work related interests. Guest speakers and lectures have ranged from celebrity visitors, to heads of state, to famous bloggers with specific domain expertise like "The Strobist" whose blog is followed by the photography cognoscenti.

Cons

I've since left Google; many of my early-day colleagues have moved to more nimble environments where the work has a deeper impact. The company has gotten very "heavy" with many layers of experts, all who bring the complexity they developed from other world-class companies they have worked in. A close friend told me "there are other companies out there who ARE what Google USED TO BE" which is to say, very lean and intimate. I love the startup mentality and the opportunity to make huge moves with everything you work on. Google is like a very large ship now; many oars must move in order to effect a turn or feel the ship shift slightly in direction.

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