What do employees at google do

Objective discussions are pretty rare, since everybody's territorial, and not interested in opinions of other people unless those people are Imp ortant Gods. Katy Levinson, Former software engineer, Infrastructure: "People feel justified asking you why you left or if you still work there, and 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.

Anonymous: "There are students from top 10 colleges who are providing tech support for Google's ads products, or manually taking down flagged content from YouTube, or writing basic code to A B test the color of a button on a site. Anonymous: "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. Anonymous: "You can fall through the cracks, and you can fall hard. This, of course, is highly unlikely given neither of them would ever smoke a cigar or drink Scotch.

Remainder is plausible. Anonymous: "I was approached by Google to take on a management position. At the same time I was hired, another person with the same name was hired. Somewhere, HR got things horribly mixed up and when I started I was in a very different, very junior position instead which would have been appropriate for the other candidate of the same name.

The employment contract was ambiguous and the relevant HR staff had long since left to work for another company so no-one could clear it up. Katy Levinson: "Any improvement not based on a hard metric was flatly not a respected use of time," said a former Google software engineer. Number of bugs? Nobody cared.

If you couldn't measure it, nobody was interested in it. Sean Gerrish, former Software Engineer : "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.

Anonymous: "The biggest negative, by far, for me has been seemingly arbitrary project cancellations," said an anonymous commenter. Adrian Carballo, former Software Engineer: "In the Bay Area the cost of living is insane, and if you work off of the MTV campus there isn't even that much to do other than working or hanging out with your coworkers.

You do have free food available all the time, and many cafes, gyms, laundry rooms, etc. You start making the same choices day in and day out. You hang out more and more with the same people you work with. Anonymous: "The spotlight. Quora questions, jealous friends who hate on your job because they didn't get in, suspicious media articles claiming every move by the company ties into some centralized advertising master plan, etc. This gets old. Nobody will just let you have your job.

It's no exaggeration to say that I met triathletes in my three years at Google. Only a handful of them were interesting people. John L. Miller, former Staff Software Engineer: "The worst part of working at Google for me was, as for many others, feeling under-utilized.

That's a depressing situation. Google makes lots of vague promises, and seems to not deliver. Googlers describe their fellow employees as " great colleagues with great technical skills ," " i ncredibly talented ," and " s uper smart.

And employees' stock continues to vest while they're on leave. This story was originally published by Glassdoor. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options.

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It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. I got an injury while I was in the U. Starting with my manager and colleague, the entire company was really sympathetic with what happened to me and encouraged me to concentrate on getting healthier. When I came back an extended time I was definitely feeling stressed, but my manager set her expectations fairly, which enabled me to ramp up very quickly and continue where I left off.

I've never had a conversation with my past managers about career trajectory as much as I've had at Google. As someone who is quite shy, it is hard for me to bring up promotions and career track with my manager.

But Google really trained the manager to be proactive about their employees' growth. I enjoy that the most. It's typical for mothers to get time off from work for up to six weeks after having a child in the US, but at Google it's another story.

New dads receive six weeks of paid leave, and moms can take 18 weeks, and employees' stock continues to vest and they continue to receive bonuses while they are on leave.

Google certainly inspires a lot of loyalty with Googlers' spouses. If a Googler passes away while working there, all their stock vests immediately, and, on top of the life insurance payout, their surviving spouse continues to get half of the Googler's salary for the next 10 years. A former engineer really liked having showers on campus :.

I love to think in the shower and frequently worked out ideas in there. The opportunity to get outside and run around if you had some energy to work off, knowing you could just shower and switch into some other clothes helped alleviate a lot of the fidgety energy I felt being pent up in a cubicle.

It let me focus on work. I also felt comfortable pushing myself harder on my morning bike ride in, knowing I could shower and change when I got there. A Zurich-based Googler says that when he joined the company in , every "Noogler" was allowed to pick out three out of a selection of books as a gift. Apparently the company has a lot of libraries too, with books about technologies, machine learning and statistics, product management, engineering and maths to name a few, that Googlers can take away and read.

Google is known for its tech talks — presentations and lectures on various topics that are open to employees to either attend or watch remotely. It was like unofficial auditing and I found it to be a nice, stress-free way to learn new things for free — although technically you weren't supposed to do this. It was kind of amazing to me that I could continue to do that while working in an industry setting. I think Google is one of few industry workplaces in the world that do a very good job of supporting something like this and I find it to be a great less-mentioned perk.

The general consensus is it's the people, the business, and the technology that Google employees work with that make it worth being there. A current employee wrote that the risk-reward ratio at Google was a great factor :.

We have an amazing business that keeps growing, that customers and users love, and that provides us with more job stability than almost any other company. It's not going to make any one of us rich, but the risk-reward ratio is pretty good, and sustainable. In addition to vacations, Google's leave policies give workers more opportunities to explore life outside of the workplace.

Googlers can take a three-month leave of unpaid time off, under specific circumstances. Healthcare benefits continue for unpaid leaves of up to three months. Googlers can use their time off to work with nonprofit organizations, political campaigns, and other community-oriented projects they're interested in.

Once a Googler, always a Googler. One ex-employee read: Xoogler says that the alumni support is one of the best perks of the job. If you're aXoogler, you'll know someone in any country you visit. This story first appeared on Business Insider.