Google

Excellent compensation and benefits. Google cafeterias and swag were a nice perk until they cut everything with the budget cuts. Very smart software engineers and research scientists. Some of the best in the world working on AI and ML.

• Poor work/life balance. I usually worked 60+ hours/week, including weekends, to keep up with the workload. I was also a high-performing employee with exceeding expectations on all of my performance reviews, but still had to work exceedingly long hours in order to keep ahead of things.

• Terrible DEI scores. Lower morale reviews by women and underrepresented employees at Google and higher turnover. The company has tried to improve this, but so much more needs to be done.

• Executive/Senior management does not take responsibility for their actions and are out of touch with their employees.

• Complete chaos inside with simple work being over-processed regarding work, performance reviews, promotions, etc. People are not recognized for their great, hard work, but rather, how well they get along with others and don’t rock the boat.

• HR cannot be trusted, does the minimum amount of work required (and this goes all the way to the top), and protects senior management as their #1 priority. There are a few good HR employees, but even they are unhappy in their roles.

• Over 12,000 employees were laid off so far in 2023 and many of them were high-performing employees and/or were recently promoted. Why would anyone want to work for a company that they would need to be looking over their shoulder all the time, working hard, just to get laid off because management didn’t do their job with properly planning? This goes all the way up to the CEO and his leadership team. They gave themselves massive long-term equity this year yet they are not held accountable with the company’s problems. They say “I take full accountability,” but it means nothing in the end.

I had one of the worst managers of my career at Google. This person was a micromanager to their employees, insecure, and only managed up. It was truly amazing that the company kept this VP around with such low PMR and Googlegeist scores. The morale in this organization was terrible. All we did was re-organize all the time. It was exhausting, and I recently left for a more normal job where I am recognized for the good work that I’m doing and I’m now making a positive and meaningful difference in advancing tech.

The company says that it has “Responsible AI,” but that is just a good marketing statement. Google has a small team that works on Responsible AI, but several of them were impacted with in the 2023 layoffs, and the ethics team were let go. Google has a lot of talk around responsible AI, but at the end of the day, the Product Areas (PA’s) can do what they want, and the engineers have full reign on decisions—unless Legal has to finally step in.

Hold executive and senior management accountable for the mistakes they made over the pandemic with over-hiring and not planning properly.

Some important groups were cut down to the bone, yet there are some other departments that are bloated with employees making no significant impact to the company.