Verily

Google-ish benefits and pay. Early in your engineering career, you can learn a lot here.

Incoherent product strategy.

This leads to superficial product plans and partnerships that look great in a press release but wilt under the slightest business pressure when things get tough.

Hint: things always get tough in health care.

Business dev people rush to sign partnerships without thinking through long-term alignment issues. Biz dev people are rewarded for closing the deal and move on to the next whale hunt. Engineering is left holding the bag, trying to figure it all out over the next 12 to 18 months. Things then crumble after countless person-years are wasted, and the cycle starts again.

Eventually, something does stick, but you are rolling the dice on your personal career in the 1 in 5 chance that what sticks is the project you are on. You have some control of the outcome, but not that much, as most decisions are top-down and structural/macroeconomic issues are often insurmountable.

Verily products are not obvious money-makers. While getting paid extremely well, most likely you will not launch anything. The situation pays the rent but leaves an empty feeling inside you.

Doing too much.

The Google mindset is to plant 1000 seeds and let a few flowers bloom. That works at Google, where there is infinite money, but at Verily, it just means the strategy provides no rubric for making the hard decisions of A vs. B, and eventually, both A and B are pursued with limited resources for both.

Get ready for a ton of Google-y process and a decent amount of land-grab politics in mid-management. You will find several teams essentially doing the same thing.

Culture.

You will either love it or hate it. Most people are mission-driven here, so if health tech is your thing, you will find it here. For engineers not into health tech, you will find it sterile and boring.

Process, compliance, byzantine health systems, strange workflows, and hard-to-comprehend data. And the pace. The pace is slow. Slow.

If you need to work with any other team, expect things to take 5x longer since that other team is underwater and dealing with their own fires. People are really stressed out, and this was even before COVID. It’s hard to do good work when your motivation is fear of failure and how that impacts your career versus a passion for building great products.

The vibe is 4.0 GPA students who can ace every test, but the execution is purely mechanical. Psychological safety discussed but not truly lived.

Immature and uninspired mid-management.

Strange, inconsistent, and often incoherent decision-making around bonuses, performance management, people management, and work-from-home policies during the pandemic. Combine with a foot-in-the-mouth communication style.

There are several new execs in the ranks, and their influence is still percolating through the org. The exec team is full of super-stars, but they need to fix the basic stuff.

Focus. Think more critically about partnerships before committing. Cleaning up the mess will require hard choices.

Not sure how to fix the culture. Try to inspire more and performance manage less? It's hard to fake passion.