My Experience at Google — The Pros and Cons

Working at Google is a dream for many tech enthusiasts, and I had the chance to experience it at the headquarters between 2016 and 2018. In this post, I will summarize some of the good and bad I encountered there.

As a caveat, my stint was brief (nearly two years), and I was experimenting with a different role of Technical Program Manager from my core experience as a Software Engineer and Engineering Manager. At the end of my experiment, while I could have switched to a more traditional software engineer role within Google, there were pros and cons to staying within the ecosystem. I ultimately found more opportunities to grow my career outside. Here’s a frank summary of the pros and cons of my experience at Google.

The Pros

For me, one of the biggest pros of working at Google was being surrounded by some of the brightest minds in the industry. It was fascinating to see what lengths people will go to solve a problem, and the level of creativity and freedom felt unparalleled. Initially, I worked on offline attribution for online ads, which required a vast amount of external collaboration to get store visits and store purchase data for users who had seen online ads and ended up showing offline interest in those products. Later, I worked with a large team to create manual ad suggestions until the AI was sufficiently trained to provide advertisers with improved ad titles, descriptions, and formatting. Working at this scale of collaboration and manual effort to fuel innovation made me realize how Google’s mindset and ability to spend its resources without having to focus immediately on profitability helped unlock some of the most significant technological advancements in the last quarter of a century (e.g., Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Photos, and Alphabet’s Waymo). I felt a sense of power and joy that humanity can achieve anything with enough resources and collaboration.

I also felt in awe of the excellent coding practices and the clean, well-structured, easy-to-read production-level code. Though it took me a few code reviews to understand the best practices, I can see how, over time, these would become second nature and improve a person’s foundational technical approach. Being able to apply these coding conventions across the entire company was in itself an astounding achievement. Though I had seen most other organizations outside of Google fumble with these basics, often struggling to balance the short-term deliverables with the long-term investment in people and code, it was good to see that Google had managed to strike a balance at such a large scale.

I appreciated that Google created a safe space for diverse personalities and work styles. People could be whomever they wanted without pressure to socialize, fit into a certain mold, or conform to specific expectations. I sometimes felt like it was a haven for all the brilliant misfits one encountered while growing up. However, it stifled camaraderie to a degree because people were sensitive about not offending anyone. Even so, accepting and welcoming social misfits made room to unleash creativity and unlock unique innovations.

It’s already well-known that the facilities at Google are top-notch. It’s hard not to indulge in many high-quality free services and amenities. The on-site gyms and cafeterias are available in many buildings, and the campuses in international locations provide respite even on personal travel. The food options were incredible, and I couldn’t help but observe that even most kings wouldn’t have had access to that vast variety of high-quality meals every day. The free personal trainers and massage therapists exceeded all expectations. There were world-class guest speakers and events, amongst other things, and the only downside was that there wasn’t always time to relish in all the goodies available.

The Cons

However, there are also some cons to working at Google.

One of the most significant downsides that I observed was a stratification based on perceived intelligence based on titles. While the organization is supposedly flat, it is pretty bloated horizontally, which means there’s a series of people involved between development and production (parsing the meaning of some of the titles like TPM, PTM, PgM, etc., and what each person’s role entailed was mind-boggling at times). Many people in the chain were engineers supporting the core development teams, like creating tools, data pipelines, reports, dashboards, or interfacing between customers, external stakeholders, internal data processing teams, etc., on their behalf. What got to me was that more than one person mentioned that it doesn’t matter what your degree or experience is; if you don’t have the SWE (Software Engineer) title at Google, you are not considered an engineer. Also, there was inherently lower or higher respect based on this labeling (if I understand correctly because the person had not passed the bar of the Google SWE interview…?). Besides the indignance I felt on behalf of many of my colleagues, I found this personally insulting since I had intentionally taken on a non-traditional engineering role within Google. Fortunately, not all people behaved or felt this way, but it was something palpable in the culture.

At least, within the organization I was part of, tier-based deference was also at play based on the organization’s hierarchy. When an engineering manager was around, the reports listened with rapt attention. When the Director came in, the manager would take a back seat, and when a Vice President entered the room, boy oh boy, would everyone else go quiet!! I found this at odds with the impression the world outside has of the flat organizational structure and “equality” at Google. I hope this was limited to my organization. I felt grateful that the above aspects of Google culture had not seeped outside, lest other companies, like all things Google, start emulating this behavior too.

For many, there was a feeling of being just one cog in a giant wheel, and it can be challenging to feel like you’re making a difference. In the beginning, I stretched myself too thin as I was trying to prove my worth, and eventually, when I found balance, I struggled to feel useful at times, even though the peer feedback was always great. Both at Yahoo! and at eBay, I felt like I was at the cutting edge of innovation, working and learning to solve some of the newest problems of scale and content in the web applications industry. At Google, I felt like I was supporting those who were solving those problems. No doubt, partly because of my role, but through the anonymous chat groups, I felt like there was overall less satisfaction among the employees. Many stayed due to the fantastic benefits, the decent work-life balance, and the brand name — a true golden cage.

The flip side of the facilities being so good (food services, personal care services, wellness services, etc.) was that I felt cut off from the world outside. I lost track of new restaurants, coffee shops, and events in my local area. As odd as it sounds, I missed meeting regular people. I remember being so excited after leaving Google when I joined a local neighborhood gym and met all sorts of people — teachers, recruiters, construction workers, and some tech workers. I like the cerebral kind, but also love meeting people from diverse backgrounds; this was a breath of fresh air for me.

Lastly, compared with all the other large corporations I worked at, I found that people at Google were less charitable and more self-serving than I expected. Three examples of this come to mind. One was when I parked my car crookedly while running for a meeting and received an insulting anonymous note on my windshield. This sharply contrasts with how charitable an eBayer had been when I bumped their car and left them my email address for repairs, only to hear back that it was an old car and they would happily forego the repair altogether. The other was at an organized company event where my kids and I waited in line for over an hour for a portrait,. Still, the party ahead of us kept getting more and more of their group done without any empathy for the artist or the rest of us in line until they ran out the clock. I distinctly recalled how friendly and courteous our events at IBM used to be, and people would happily step aside to make room for young children. And lastly, at Yahoo! and eBay, the ergonomics team would come by and ensure the setup was appropriate for each employee, adjusting desks, ordering proper equipment, etc. At Google (perhaps because too many employees were trying to grab the best equipment or maybe because I wasn’t an SWE, I don’t know), oddly, I had to get a doctor’s note just to get the right ergonomic keyboard and chair for myself. Empathy was sometimes lacking, and it was challenging to connect with people on a personal level, though, of course, I did make some good friends!

In conclusion, working at Google has its pros and cons. I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked with some of the brightest minds in the industry, learned that good coding practices at scale are possible, and realized that anything is possible when a diverse set of humans collaborate at a large scale. I do believe that Google should work to increase respect towards all employees (not just Google labeled Software Engineers), not over-shelter employees from the outside world (that’s where the customers are), motivate a more enormous swathe of employees through meaningful work (not just great benefits) and improve the level of empathy in its culture.

I am still appreciative of my time there and the network I still have. I also continue to be an avid user of Google’s products and wish them continued success! But if you regret not having been able to “crack the interview,” know that Google is not the be-all and end-all of software engineering organizations. Even though my reach was more expansive, I found that I often made more satisfying impacts at other companies and roles.