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A golden dead end

Software Engineer Manager
Current Employee
Has worked at Google for 4 years
January 17, 2025
Zürich, Switzerland
2.0
Doesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

Compensation & benefits

The Google stamp on your resume

Great "rest and vest" opportunities if you know how to be efficient at your job.

Cons

Very slow career growth.

Close to impossible to innovate and build products iteratively.

Performance review frameworks create a culture in which individuals and teams build fences around what they own and promote complex solutions even to trivial problems.

There is a big lack of clear leadership who hides behind promoting decisions by consensus and influence. This leads to endless conversations and painfully slow progress from user research to design to implementation.

Folks who have been at the company 5y+ (or their whole career) do not know that there is a world outside where better products are built faster and cheaper.

Advice to Management

Stop looking at your own belly button. Instead of trying to rebuild in-house, take the risk of creating partnerships with smaller companies that have superior products.

Don't hire top programmers who want to build complex systems. Hire pragmatic engineers that strive for simple and elegant solutions.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
4.0
Culture and Values
3.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
4.0
Career Opportunities
1.0
Compensation and Benefits
5.0
Senior Management
2.0

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