Here's what Googlers have to say about working at Google

Landing a job at Google isn’t easy, but once you do, you’re life is made, or so it seems. However, life at Google isn’t as rosy as one would make it out to be, if one were to go by this thread.
These responses are by both former and current employees of Google.

 

Imposter Syndrome:

 

Kaushik Ramajayam, a software engineer at Google says, “ It’s an amazing feeling to be constantly surrounded by talented, accomplished people, but sometimes, it can sting.  If you thought you were good at your job before joining Google, your ego will quickly be punctured. Some people can deal with it, but a handful just can’t. They don’t survive for long at Google.

 

Experiment, what?  
 

Piaw Na says, “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.” 

 

Savvy politician:

Deepak Shukla says, “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.


 

G for Google
 

“Joe Cannella, former senior account manager: "Basically, you end up spending the majority of your life eating Google food, with Google coworkers, wearing Google gear, talking in Google acronyms, sending Google emails on Google phones, and you eventually start to lose sight of what it's like to be independent of the big G, and every corner of your life is set up to reinforce the idea that you would be absolutely insane to want to be anywhere else. To which the majority of folks will say 'boo-hoo, poor spoiled Googler'. But that's sort of the point. You are given everything you could ever want, but it costs you the only things that actually matter in the end. In the end, what I started to see was the most amazing, talented, passionate group of people I've ever known, all in one place, with no free time or energy to pursue the things that mattered the most to them. Many want to change the world, and they thought that's what they'd do while at Google. Sometimes that happens.... but not nearly enough."

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