And my experience was that the people who spent all their time at Google were the ones that ended up on the sexier projects or in charge of things
But along with the food came the Google lifestyle: if you were staying for dinner, it better be because you were working afterwards. I think a lot of people spent quite a bit of time either just before or just after dinner hanging out and not really being all that productive, which is nice for the mostly 20-something crowd, but I can sympathize with the people who have families that didn’t fit in. I had my own reasons for not wanting to hang out at work, so I never really got that far into the Google social scene. (Admittedly, some of these people were also workaholics, and I wasn’t willing to give up some of my non-work social activities, but there seemed to be a bit of favoritism going on as well.)
Engineers and everyone else: Unlike most other engineers, I had a job that required me to talk to people all over the company. I talked to the lawyers, marketing, PR, product managers, executives, engineers… And because I started early enough, I also knew quite a few people in sales. As far as salary went, my offer was 35% higher than my next highest job offer, so I think I lucked out there. That was certainly not the normal situation, though. Over the years I talked to plenty of people about what they thought about Google’s compensation… There’s a huge discrepancy between engineers and non-engineers. Most of the adwords support people I talked to complained a lot about their situation. Not only were they generally overqualified for the jobs (given what the work actually was, but Google has always prided itself on having charleston sugar daddy websites people with extra education) but they could fairly easily have gotten higher-paying jobs elsewhere. The usual reason for sticking around that I heard was that after a few years at Google, their resume would look a lot better on the job market.
And that’s not counting the people who are contractors. I never understood why all of the recruiters were contractors, given that Google showed no signs of slowing down its hiring. All this meant was that a lot of the recruiters had to spend a lot of time training new recruiters, since they were replaced so frequently. (This, I think, goes at least partway for explaining why the hiring process was occasionally a bit slow.)
I honestly have no idea what it’s like to work for Google outside of the US, but even when you’re only 3 time zones away, it’s sometimes hard to get noticed by Mountain View
Management My biggest pet peeve was the management, or lack thereof, at Google. I went through many managers in my first few years. I ended up having at least one manager during this time that was an unpopular manager, and because of that, I was told many times over that I shouldn’t bother trying to get a promotion. When I left, I had never been re-slotted. This, in spite of the fact that my technical judgment was respected enough that I occasionally delayed launches until their logging systems were operating correctly. And in spite of the fact that I essentially consulted to other technical groups. I could go on about this for a while, but then I might actually sound like I was bitter.
Remote offices I worked in Mountain View for 3 years before moving to New York. Around that time, I started traveling a lot: I had college alumni activities in southern California, so I occasionally worked out of Santa Monica, and my brother lived in Seattle, so I worked in Kirkland a few times. The “Google experience” is substantially different outside of Mountain View. And being outside of the Mountain View culture bubble makes it that much harder to get taken seriously.