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Not quite 'just another big company.' Yet. 3.5 stars.

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Google for 6 years
January 30, 2026
San Francisco, CA
3.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

There's a lot of good stuff to work on, fantastic tooling, and less tech debt than most places of similar size. Colleagues are usually very skilled and smart.

Cons

There was a time when Google had an unusually good culture of openness, technical excellence, doing the right thing, and not letting all the usual bureaucratic turf wars bog it down. That time has entirely passed.

Getting to work on the good stuff is a matter of politics over suitability, performance reviews have gained the bad parts of the standard methods and kept the bad parts of the idiosyncratic methods, and you will face turf wars that get in the way of doing your job.

Also, the strategy to avoid tech debt is 'reimplement everything after 5 years or kill it', which has always had its drawbacks.

Advice to Management

If you actually care, beg Larry and Sergey back and give them veto power on all top-level execs. Maybe someone else they pick can exercise the veto. Nothing less will be enough to restore the good times; the culture rotted from the top down starting as they left.

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