Pros
- great benefits and 401K match - great food - half-naked cuties play beach volleyball on campus - really intelligent coworkers - fascinating industry and company profile
Cons
- managers detached, not aligned with team goals, focus on networking and their next job - chaotic, siloed organization, lots of inefficiency - sales organization is afterthought, mostly exists to patch up bad adwords user experience - so you're there to fix a problem nobody wants to admits exists. not a great career track! - i had two young MBAs as managers who both left me baffled as to what it is they did, or knew how to do. both were promoted! one sat me down in a 1:1 and told me to focus on my family and private life more, because caring too much about my job would only lead to problems because most of the issues in our department were not going to be fixed, and that's not really how you advance in your career anyway. it was good advice and all true, but it tells you something that this is what my soon-to-be-promoted boss told me. - lots of activity that has nothing to do with the company's products or business goals: events, parties, dance classes, on-campus organizations, etc. it's a lot like college that way. it's possible to spend A LOT of your time on tangential activities, keep getting good performance reviews (because the diversity festival or whatever is so great for google), and just hang out and make money and never impact the business. To me, this is really weird and not a plus, but a lot of people of course love it. - I left because basically I realized that if what I had achieved in the last year did not get me a promotion (major overhaul of one aspect of the business), nothing ever would. promotions aren't really about business impact at Google, they are about NOT having too much of an impact and rocking the boat. Having a dog helps a lot.