Google

Great perks. Good pay (at first). Great benefits.

• Little to no vision from upper management; the company has become increasingly reactive rather than proactive. • Little prospect of career advancement; promos kept getting scarcer and scarcer during the time I worked there. • Compensation shrinks over time, as they don’t give very good raises. • The company has become riddled with bureaucracy and internal politics in the last few years. • I kept hearing from colleagues that the best way to get a promotion or a raise at Google was to leave and come back. • Upper management has pretty much alienated their employees over the past decade, and all their emails about their wonderful ski trips and how we’re all in this together feel really condescending. • Constant reorgs makes your position in any given group shaky at best.

I was one of the 12kers. Even before leaving Google, I felt like the company was going downhill. When I joined, I kept being sold this vision that Google always tries to aim for the stars (or the moon, rather) and workers were empowered to be the change they wanted to see. However, since I joined, everything was growing increasingly bureaucratic to the point where talking to your colleagues was considered improper procedure, and it was hard to get anything done. We kept seeing projects get shut down due to shortsightedness from upper management. They would keep telling us that they were listening to us and taking our concerns seriously, even though their actions said otherwise. I think Google has decayed to a point where they are just another big company with well-established products in which upper management doesn’t feel like they really need to try very hard anymore.