Google User Experience Program Manager reviews

The base salary and lack of promotion opportunities really start to wear down employee morale after the first few years. Unfortunately, there's too many glassy-eyed Google cultists/lifers who are willing to overwork themselves for a 35% (or more) paycut on projects that may not actually go anywhere. Despite claiming to seek openness, management keeps a lot of secrets-- especially around performance reviews (all employees are graded and rank-ordered, but employees don't get to know how well they fared). In terms of actual productive work, employees are demoralized by having direction constantly changed. I suppose this is known as "keeping us on our toes." Further, it's tiring to hear every team say that they're acting as their own startup within Google, and that team members are going to be hand-picked to be involved in such a prestigious project. It's not uncommon for entire teams to be uprooted or replaced in one fell swoop. Put together, this leads to an uneasy feeling about one's job stability. One final problem: too many Googlers are young, inexperienced, and short-sighted in their understanding of how much power they actually have in developing public-facing products. They don't understand the implications of their actions, and move too quickly to consider them.

The larger the company gets, the more the culture becomes dilute. The past year or two has brought extensive change in terms of management hierarchy to certain area of the company. With the hiring or more and more managers from the outside, the company has lost some of its democratic idealism in favor of traditional corporate politics. Google is now a very large company, and it's hard to avoid all of the downsides that accompany such size. It can also be very difficult to find a career path at Google. Promotions are exceptionally rare. Despite the fact that employees can theoretically excel in both individual contributor and management tracks, there is still a feeling that the only way to climb the corporate ladder is to become a manager. It's also the case that people are often promoted into management roles without the necessary skills and training, leading to poor relationships between teams and leaders. It also becomes more and more difficult to make fast progress on projects as the company gets larger. Google is still very nimble compared to most large companies, but it's no longer a scrappy startup unencumbered by size.