So People Who Work for Google don't really have Perfect

So People Who Work for Google don't really have Perfect Lives, do They?

To software engineers around the world, stories of how people go to work for Google not for the money, but for the opportunity to change the world, seem literally true. The media likes to trumpet stories like how the Christmas presents at Google are expensive and unavailable tech toys, how there are eat-all-you-can ethnic food courts everywhere, how the engineers get a day every week to work on projects of their own, that they don't need Google's permission for and above all the Google stock options millionaires. But is it really like that or is that too good to be true? There are many people who have been to work for Google with all these dreams in their hearts, who have nevertheless come away quite disappointed. Google recently polled all these ex-employees to open up about what exactly it was about Google that disappointed them. And you would not believe some of the things they have to say.

About the one thing that you hear most of all in all the bitter bellyaching that you read about in their revelations, is their annoyance with the Google HR mantra, about how people don't go to work for Google for the money. Over and over again, in their frank you hear ex-Google employee's wonder at how this super-rich company cannot afford to pay its engineers the same as Microsoft. Apparently the hiring process at Google is something that can take the best part of the new year. There are rounds of interviews that will never end, and apparently; often, potential employees find that interview was done by someone who isn't really an expert in your line. And if you ask why you're being interviewed by someone who is an expert in an unconnected field, you get the reply that Google, this is somehow getting in there and mixing it up. If you plan to work for Google, the company's founder Larry Page actually goes through your details personally by hand. It seems to smell to many of bureaucracy, something you would normally not choose to associate with the dynamic and company you imagine Google is.

If a company is handing out stock options left and right, surely that means they're generous at least? Apparently that's not quite true. A couple of years ago, Google apparently began to take down its famed food courts, because it was costing them thousands of dollars a day. For a company that makes $22 billion in the year in revenues, that would seem quite heavy. One of the first things that you run up against when you put in your application to work for Google, as that they ask you to take a great pay cut, and only copayments on your health insurance. This is certainly not the norm in the tech industry. Microsoft completely takes care of its employees. For a company that people called bureaucratic, cold and distant, they certainly seem nice to their employees.

But what is it like actually getting down to work at Google, once you're in? Reactions are varied. Software engineers on the outside feel that it is this huge organic organization where great ideas are they batted about until they form something larger than any of the people who assemble it. But once in, it always strikes Google engineers how there are just too many of them, all spoiling the broth. There are thousands of engineers, not properly coordinated, with no one really driving anything, just pushing and pulling to get something done. And everything that Google is about the search engine and the browser. People who go to work for Google with 1000 great ideas, feel constrained, often, by the relentless emphasis on the search engine. Everyone feels that the problem is, that the managers only know how to completely let go, or micromanage. There's nothing in between.

Of course, to work for Google outside of the US is nothing like working in the US. The culture changes, the bureaucracy settles in more tightly and to pay an innovation take a dive. Perhaps Google has made the cardinal error: when you keep saying that you likes to think out of the box, that people don't really care about money and so on, you ar not to forget that all is just a marketing line, that it is not real.