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Good place overall

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Google for 6 years
March 20, 2014
Mountain View, California
4.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
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, and 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, 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.

Advice to Management

Keep up the good work.

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