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Incredible benefits, boring job

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Google for 2 years
September 18, 2022
Mountain View, California
3.0
RecommendsNeutral OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Really good infrastructure for pretty much everything: food, fitness, arts, games, maker spaces. Working on the main Mountain View campus is probably the closest I can imagine to a utopian vision of a socialist society, where there's a ton of stuff available for anyone to use.

Cons

The actual work sucks. It's just a pointless treadmill of working on other people's fever dreams that get canceled or shuffled around every six months.

I quit because I realized if I stayed there any longer, I would have absolutely no actual work experience to point to if I ever wanted to leave and get hired anywhere else.

The entire company's hiring strategy is just to hire as many people as possible (lest another one of the tech giants picks them up), and let them try to figure out how to be useful (and then end up making ten competing chat apps).

But if you're looking for something well-compensated, stable, and with a lot of great perks, you can do a heck of a lot worse.

Advice to Management

Stop requiring experimental features and code to be polished to a completed degree. This means that all iteration and experimentation takes 10 times as long as it needs to, and creates way too much investment in doomed ideas and projects.

On the flip side, stop treating experimental features/code as ready for market products that need to be released in a half-finished state to compete and capture market share.

Stop buying out every single small company that shows any promise or viability. This is what monopolization is, and it makes everyone worse off.

Actually allow (perhaps even actually enforce) "20% time", since otherwise people will lose all creativity and drive.

Let people with kids take extra time off to take care of them. I can guarantee that you aren't getting any more than 3 productive days per week out of any of your employees anyways; just embrace it.

Additional Ratings

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

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