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A good place to start, but do not stay there for long

Stff Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Google for less than 1 year
December 14, 2010
Mountain View, California
2.0
Doesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

Google is the best place to start for a fresh graduate. You can learn a lot here.

I loved working on MapReduce infrastructure; the Google implementation is years ahead of any implementation (Hadoop, etc.) and I learned a lot.

It was incredibly easy to find a job after I left Google. My experience was valued very much by other companies.

Until very recent times, Google was the best place to work on new, innovative projects in any area, from information retrieval and natural language processing to large-scale distributed systems. The infrastructure of datacenters is very impressive; very few companies can give you similar resources.

It's up to the employee to decide how much time they spend in the office and how much time they work from home.

Food is free, and many other benefits are available.

Cons

Google management is pretty bad. Many cool, innovative ideas from engineers were "killed" by managers because they were unable to understand their importance. Projects similar to Facebook and Yelp were made at Google a long time ago, and they did not start and succeed because of management failure. Top management never understood the importance of social and local until a very recent time.

Promotion systems are really bad. I was glad to get my promotions, but many people are very unhappy. There is no fair system to evaluate the quality and amount of your results. Basically, everything depends on your manager; if he likes you, you are doing very well. If he dislikes you, you are in hell.

Recent privacy scandals were very embarrassing for many employees. I did not expect my company to intercept Wi-Fi traffic.

Advice to Management

Start respecting your employees and listening to them.

Start respecting privacy laws, so your employees will respect you and your policies.

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