I don’t have as much insight into Google as I’d like, though what I hear isn’t always good, especially when it comes to pay. That Google has historically paid below market wasn’t an issue for earlier employees who grew rich after the company went public. Today, however, despite the continued cache that working at Google confers, the low pay can sting.
But that’s apparently not the only gripe of people who’ve worked at Google. Over the weekend, TechCrunch obtained what looks like an authentic thread of emails from ex-Googlers elaborating on what they liked, and what they hated, about their experiences at the company.
The list is long, and many of the same complaints resurface time and again, including around Google’s “ruthlessly inefficient” hiring process, which has become notoriously long. (Google’s 20th employee, David DesJardins, told me that back in 1999, he was offered a job three days after calling the company. Today, it routinely takes three to six months to land a job there.)
Herewith are two of the most insightful letters run by TechCrunch. To see many others, click here.
From: Aaron
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:48:41 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Thurs, Jun 12 2008 2:48 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.
My previous employer was sinking fast, and Google seemed like a good
opportunity to get out.
First, I was really disappointed with the salary that Google offered.
During negotiations, they accommodated me a little, but not much. I
was barely making more than I had been in the midwest, and the
difference in CA state taxes wiped out almost all of that. Then
there’s rent. My wife and I don’t have any debt, we pay cash for our
cars, we live in a modest apartment, we only have one small child, and
we don’t travel or live a luxurious lifestyle. Yet we were already
dipping into savings during the second month just to pay the bills.
Part of it was certainly my fault; I shouldn’t have accepted such a
low offer.
The relocation and hiring bonus’ stated values were pre-tax! That was
a huge unexpected blow to the pocketbook. It may sound strange to
some, but Google’s the only company that has ever done that to me.
Again, that’s mostly my fault; I made a naive assumption.
The relocation company told us it would take 8-12 days to get our
stuff. It took 14 days. We managed as best we could for almost 2
weeks with a 1-month-old baby in an apartment with no furniture, no
extra clothes, and a rental car. Google should have taken more
responsibility and initiative on this, but they stood very much
aloof. Their only other option was the corporate housing option (move
twice!). If I had known it would be this bad, I would have rented my
own truck for 1/3 of what Google paid the moving company. I can drive
from Indiana in 3 days; I’ve done it many times.
Anyway, Google should know that good engineers are in high demand.
They get their market value, especially in the Bay Area. So after
only 3 months at Google, I was aggressively recruited by another
company that offered 2x my base salary (which has been increased
repeatedly since then). The company also wanted to hire me to do what
I am most skilled at doing, and I could never say that about Google.
I took the job. I get invitations to interview at companies regularly
(Apple contacted me most recently) but I turn them down every time. I
like what I’m doing, I believe I’m well-paid, and we just released a
very successful product.
There are nice things about Google. I met some intelligent and good
people that will be lifelong friends. I got to see Ron Paul speak,
and I have many fond memories. The bureaucracy and authoritarian
“gods of coding rules and regulations” were crippling for an
experienced developer, but are probably just the right thing for
someone green out of college. To me, the food wasn’t that big of a
deal. It was good, but I’m not much of an eater. However, I was
really disappointed when the hot chocolate started disappearing from
the mini-kitchens. I hope that 20 cents a day was worth it to them!
As a full-time employee I prefer a good salary to graduallyevaporating
fringe benefits and arbitrarily-sized bonuses. I started
out in the dot-com boom, and I’ve seen those empty promises go
unfulfilled time and time again.
I’m not bitter anymore; just disappointed that Google didn’t come
close to what I thought it would be.
From: “Greg
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 20:29:18 -0400
Local: Fri, May 30 2008 6:29 pm
Subject: Re: So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously.
I wonder how much of a difference there is between
engineering/non-engineering and MV/non-MV, in addition to the
old-timer/non-old-timer split.
I started working at Google a while ago as an engineer when there was
only the Mountain View office. (If I recall correctly, the NY sales
office opened later that month.) Google certainly seemed like an
ideal place to work at the time, and if I wanted to be an engineer,
I’d probably still want to work there. But there were certainly
issues, even back then, and I believe they’ve mostly gotten worse as
the company has grown.
The hiring process:
Google’s hiring process tends to have a lot of false negatives. If I
had submitted my resume myself, rather than getting recommended by an
employee, I don’t know if I would have gotten in. My GPA was a 3.7,
and the cutoff (at least at one point in Google’s history) was 3.8 (I
went to a tough school, the 6th 4.0 GPA in its history just graduated
this year). I honestly don’t know if this cap is still there (I
suspect not) but this is just one way Google arbitrarily cut down on
the number of people interviewed.
After I had been working, I found out that I was lucky that one of the
members of my team hadn’t interviewed me. My C++ skills weren’t
really all that great, since I hadn’t used C++ in a couple of years,
and I would have totally failed if he had interviewed me. He told me
that he would have been wrong to do so, since I actually ended up
replacing him on the team and automating most of what he had been
doing by hand, so I hope that my example helped make at least one
interviewer a little more reasonable. But the old-timers certainly
felt like they had to have tough interviews, and in many cases “tough”
equated to things like trivia questions or brain teasers, neither of
which are completely relevant to what people were being interviewed
for.
The Google lifestyle:
Food at Mountain View in the early days was great. Things got a bit
crazy when Charlie was cooking in the same tiny kitchen that he had
cooked for 70 people in when there were something like 400 people
eating in the cafe, although the food quality didn’t go down nearly as
much as I would have expected it to. But this was just one of many
examples of overcrowding in the offices that happened over the years
at Google. (And honestly, keeping the cooks happy seemed like a good
idea to me…)
But along with the food came the Google lifestyle: if you were staying
for dinner, it better be because you were working afterwards. It was
frowned upon to leave right after dinner. 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. 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. (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
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.)
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. 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.
This e-mail has gotten a lot longer than I really meant it to. But my
point is that there are plenty of good reasons people can have
negative impressions of working at Google. Just like there are plenty
of good reasons people have great experiences there.
