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Pretty good internship

Software Engineering Intern
Former Employee
Worked at Google for 1 year
November 28, 2015
Mountain View, California
5.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros
  • Very smart people if you get on the right team.
  • Chance to work on really big products that over a billion people use.
  • Good learning experience in terms of engineering practices, team organization, management style, etc.
  • Lots of resources for you to learn on your own if you so choose.
  • Company is still a prestigious place to work 17 years after founding (this is really unique in tech). Great brand equity. Head hunters start poaching you as soon as you add Google to your LinkedIn. You could ace every interview you apply for in the future. People in other industries like management consulting and finance respect it too.
  • Perks are spectacular.
Cons

The interview process was painful. Host matching took over 3 months.

Not all teams are good. Due to its size, Google has some not-so-great people, and if you have to work with them, you will be miserable.

People who have worked here a long time tend to be complacent and non-entrepreneurial. They don't have the same drive as people at startups.

Everything is done the Google way, which is generally as efficient as it gets at this scale, but is still slow, methodical, and perhaps suboptimal.

For a company that is super successful on the outside, people on the inside don't seem to know what they're doing as much as you would hope. They're just working on every possible project under the sun, fueled by ad money, hoping to strike gold with a few products.

Politics and bureaucracy exist, though they make an active effort to reduce it.

Advice to Management

Try to reinvigorate the entrepreneurial startup culture of the early days. Give employees more autonomy, hire fewer people, and focus efforts.

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