What is the worst part about working at Google? Sign up for Quora Continue with Google Continue with Facebook By continuing, I agree that I am at least 13 years old and have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. 62 Answers Katy Levinson Katy Levinson, Former SWE, infrastructure 163.4k Views • Upvoted by Mehmet Fidanboylu, L6 developer @ Google, Piaw Na, Worked at Google, Jeremy Hoffman, Google software engineer (search quality) We were essentially rewarded for either dreaming up totally new wildly innovative things, or improving existing things with hard metrics. This lead to imaginative unmaintained nightmares, frequently based on discarded shells of other platforms nobody maintained. We had four internal-only official javascript libraries. Why? Because writing an innovative javascript library could get you a promotion! My product was built on a bastardized version of what one day became Google App Engine (GAE). It worked sort of like GAE, except without a lot of stuff implemented, and nobody was maintaining it at all. It also meant that many other things were maintained longer than they should have been. You could campaign to have the whole system rewritten, or you could get a bonus this quarter for twirling up some side metric that didn't matter a whole lot. What would you do? This also meant that any improvement not based on a hard metric was flatly not a respected use of time. Usability? Number of bugs? Nobody cared. If you couldn't measure it, nobody was interested in it. Server provisioning was terrible. You were suppose to have your stuff in enough zones that you could withstand a planned outage, but people were often lucky to get it up in one. Then they get mad at you when you need to take it down for maintenance. There was a very clear policy saying have it in more than one zone, but a lot of the little projects couldn't get the resources. And, as Keval mentioned as well, people feel justified asking you why you left or if you still work there, insist that everything must be perfect. They don't want to hear anything less than total enthusiasm for your luck getting into Google, and how much you want to stay. If you left or have anything other than rainbows and ponies to talk about, nearly everybody from my mother to my cab driver pretty much demands you explain why you'd be anything less than thrilled to work at Google. I think that's the marketing campaign that employees at Google have everything they could ever need to be happy is one of Google's most impressive products, when in reality, their perks are not unusual for a company of its size in Silicon Valley at all, and the majority of the features are replicated in the smaller companies too. You watch many of your coworkers get weird and dependent at Google, and realize the Google lifestyle has made them basically unemployable anywhere else. You secretly start wondering if you could cut it on the outside too. Updated 105w ago • View Upvotes Related Questions More Answers Below What is the worst thing about working at Samsung? What was the worst outage Google had? What is the worst thing about working in the HR department? What is the worst thing about working in Apple, Microsoft and Google? Why do people dream about working in Google when they can also dream about starting a new 'Google'? Anonymous Anonymous 71k Views • Upvoted by Piaw Na, Worked at Google Position: Manager Group: Advertising (Technical Client-Facing) I'm going Anonymous on this because some of it sounds like sour grapes (I left Google fairly recently after more than half a decade), and I'd rather not offend co-workers I still care about. For me, it was two things: The political nature of Google's management culture; The Brand/Display Advertising business (specifically, DoubleClick) Management My last position at Google was in management, and while I loved managing the team I was given, I realised after about six months that this wasn't valued by anyone apart from the team themselves and my direct manager. If I was to get any credit as a manager, it wouldn't be for managing downwards. The next five or six layers of managers (well, the two or three that I had interactions with) were largely interested in my political skills. I learnt a lot about influencing at a distance, and became a proficient powerpoint user. The people who get ahead at Google these days, at least outside of core Engineering, are those who are the best politicians and salespeople. I left when I realised that these were skills that I didn't particularly want to develop (and when I had a good startup opportunity). That said, I think some of this type of culture is unavoidable at any big company, it's just that over the time I was at Google, it turned from a large startup into a big company, and then I entered a more political arena. The most obvious areas that this political nature manifests itself is in performance management and recruiting. The amount of horse-trading and manipulation that a manager needs to do to be able to manage their team within the system as it was (I understand that it's recently changed somewhat) is morale-breaking. To promote someone, you need to start making a case about a year in advance, and because of the curve, that means you can't really give as much credit to other people on your team (otherwise you don't have enough left to make a case for the promotion candidate). If you're fortunate enough to have a team full of high performers, unless you play a very good political game, it will be very difficult to not hand one of them a "misses expectations" anyway. Recruiting is even worse. There is intended to be no discussion of potential recruits, only a vote based on scores, and then an independent reading of feedback to make a decision. In fact, the eventual decision is made by a roomful of people who never met the candidate. The intention is that they will make a data-driven decision rather than being influenced by the candidate's persuasive abilities. The result is that a skilled hiring manager will make a decision about whether to hire based less on the candidate themselves, but on whether they can get this candidate through the hoops put in place by the committee. They then engineer the feedback to ensure a good result, and the person is hired. A secondary consequence of this is that interviewers don't get to learn from other interviewers, so interview (and feedback) quality is unlikely to improve over time. The process for getting headcount in order to be able to hire contributes to this cynical approach. Most years, headcount is frozen towards the end of the year, and temporary recruiting staff are let go. At the start of the year, cases are made for additional headcount, approved towards the end of Q1. Then hiring begins, but the recruiting pipeline is empty. It takes a quarter to build a good pipeline, and then by Q3/4, every manager is hiring like crazy to try to fill their headcount before it's frozen again at the end of the year. Advertising The day I realised I needed to change businesses was the day I saw an internal video promoting the newest update of DoubleClick's Digital Media Management Suite. I can remember the sinking feeling when I realised that success for DoubleClick meant more annoying advertising (both more advertising which is annoying, and advertising which is more annoying - a successful campaign is by definition one which distracts the user from what they are doing), and ran counter to my interests as a user and as a consumer. When I joined Google, I was sceptical about the value of advertising. I have never owned a TV, was an occasional reader of Adbusters and No Logo, and regarded advertising as a crutch for companies who lack good product. I came to understand that search ads fulfil a need both for Advertisers and users, and the story Google tells about this is very effective (and, I believe, true). Display advertising, however, is largely brand-based, and is usually used to create demand rather than find it. In my view, it frequently works against the interests of the user. DoubleClick, in fact, was the first domain I ever added to my hosts file in a primitive form of ad-blocking, so when Google bought DoubleClick, and didn't intend to shut them down, I was somewhat disappointed, but decided to view it with an open mind. I eventually found myself working for DoubleClick, and once on the inside, I realised that the user-first culture of Google hadn't rubbed off on DoubleClick. This is because all the customers of the DoubleClick brand are Advertisers and Advertising Agencies, and users have almost no exposure to DoubleClick at all (in contrast to Google itself, where the users' interaction with the brand and products forms an essential component of the value proposition to Advertisers). Hence, while Google's natural interests are aligned with users, DoubleClick's are not. I think the primary reason the DoubleClick brand still exists is not because it is strong with its customers (though that is important), but because it is almost unknown with users, and hence, untainted by their interests. Conclusion Some people at Google are fortunate enough to not be frustrated by politics, or to be particularly good at it, or able to isolate themselves from it. Some don't mind advertising, or are fortunate to be part of a product that they believe in (I was part of a few such products, but they suffered from a lack of business model, which was almost as disheartening). Some people are happy as long as they are well-paid and get free gourmet food. I found that I was battling a political machine, and if I was successful, I'd make the world a worse place through advertising. I was well-paid, but the combination of these two things frustrated me to the degree that I lost motivation, which in turn would prevent me from being promoted or moving to an area I was happy in. I found no alternative but to leave. Updated 141w ago • View Upvotes Piaw Na Piaw Na, Worked at Google 154k Views • Upvoted by Matthew Vosburgh, Pre-IPO Google employee (by 1 day) Piaw has 200+ answers in Google. The most frustrating thing about working at Google is that everything has to scale at launch. You have no opportunity and no room for experiment. Here's an example: Facebook launched first at Harvard and then slowly grew one university or three at a time before opening to the public. Orkut had no such luxury. As a result, Orkut had scalability problems almost from day one. Many products are held back for such work, and that's ok if the product turns out to be incredibly popular, but is frustrating if it ends up being a flop and all that extra work was for nothing and you could have "failed fast" and be on another iteration if you were at an independent startup instead of working for a behemoth like Google. Updated 54w ago • View Upvotes • Answer requested by Aman Anand Sean Gerrish Sean Gerrish, Former Software Engineer at Google with a PhD in machine learning 12.1k Views • Upvoted by Jeremy Hoffman, Google software engineer (search quality) Sean has 20+ answers in Google. Some of these answers are good, but some of them seem a bit over-the-top. My own view is that Google suffers from the types of problems that a company of its size is likely to suffer from, particularly around speed and willingness to try new things (though it is able to do new things in ways many smaller companies can't). By this I specifically am referring to the fact that, because Google is so big, it will be the target of many types of lawsuits, from both other companies and governments. In many cases, because people realize that Google is a multi-hundred-billion dollar company, they will rationalize that Google owes them something. For example, publishers in Spain believe that Google should pay them for showing links to their content on Google News, even though Google made no money from showing their links on the News product. Google's decision was to stop showing links to their content instead of paying them, but Google must now be very careful not to show Spanish news sites. It's lots of little things like this that mean that Google must tread carefully in order to avoid litigation. In general, Google cannot do things like violate copyright laws without immediate, significant effects. This is exacerbated because governments' laws will change to affect Google itself. In contrast, many startups can run circles around Google, not because they are better at execution (although some of them are better at execution), but because they can often get quite far by flouting regulations or civil actions before being discovered. All of this said, in my view the pros of working at Google outweigh the cons, and it is overall quite a pleasant place to work. Written 14w ago • View Upvotes Deepak Shukla Deepak Shukla, 23 jobs since the age of 14. Consulting, Advertising, Recruitment and more 12.8k Views • Upvoted by Shawn Kleinart, Google Fiber, 2012-2014 Deepak has 7 endorsements in Career Advice. From those I have spoken to: Your brain is under-utilized For all of the intellectual firepower that is harnessed often-time people are left with menial or meaningless tasks that fail to make use of their ability You have to play the game better than you've ever played it Political maneuvering - understanding how to make power moves - who are the people to align with and getting wholly onto the networking carousel matters AS MUCH as your quality of work They cannot possibly live up to the hype The perks, the benefits, the crazy cool projects. It's really no different from any top SV company and nothing 'mind-blowing'. Prepare for disappointment You're expected to give your heart and soul to it It's a little bit like investment banking. There is no world outside Google Worked at PWC/Goldman Sachs/Mckinsey/Clifford Chance/Amazon? Yup. These top companies all suffer from similar problems Good luck :)