From my experience in Google Cloud specifically (can’t speak on other parts of Google), it had all the symptoms of a toxic environment and an unhealthy workplace. It was quite shocking to see and not what you would expect from Google. I was also very surprised as not many reviews on Glassdoor reflected this.
In short, there was an abundance of crazy workloads, no work-life balance, poor morale, very aggressive people, strong argument culture (lots of tearing others down), destructive gossip, very political, poor leadership, poor communication, chaos and disorganisation.
In more detail:
1. Workloads were very intense with impossible targets and no work-life balance. From what I’ve experienced, the morale was very poor. Employees felt very miserable, were in high stress all the time, were overworked and almost never took holidays. And if they did took holidays, it was very common for them to be working during their time off (often not by choice, but because of the high pressure and intense workload). As much as people loved working for Google (massive brand), not many employees had many positive things to say about being in Google Cloud, but most would endure because of the brand. Constant complaining and venting were very common. Breaking down and crying in the office were also common. It was widely known and acknowledged that this was a problem but for years, not much has been done to correct and the situation remained the same.
2. I was also quite shocked by the style of working. Yes, you do work with very smart people, however, many were also very aggressive. It was their style to get things done and it was what had worked for them. Many others were just good ‘talkers’, but were not good at actually doing things or making things happen. If you’re dependent on them to hit your targets in a high pressure environment, it can be quite challenging to work with.
3. Your experience will probably be better if you had a good manager. I was unlucky to have had a toxic one. I was heavily micromanaged, constantly chased and workload consistently increased. I witnessed the whole team being in a state of misery and being overworked. It was a very negative vibe and very hard to watch.
4. The organisational structure was quite heavy and not flat. You had high pressure, but everything moved very slowly and was overly complicated. There were many layers and many middle managers who were bad leaders with poor leadership skills. Not sure why this was. There were some strong leaders, but very very few.
5. I found the way the company did performance reviews to be quite outdated. It was based on peer reviews and was done twice a year. Because it was done on a peer basis, most would select peers they got along with or those who would give them good reviews.
6. In general, the environment was very chaotic, disorganised, and lots of last minutes. Lots of silos and duplicate efforts. Everything was broken and nothing worked the way it should. So there were lots of firefighting and troubleshooting for very simple things.
Systems and tools were usually made in-house and I found many of them to be outdated. The company liked to create their own tools versus using tools from third parties. There were pros to this, but the downside was that many of them were just outdated and inferior compared with other tools on the market, which can make your day to day job frustrating.
7. Overall I do not recommend Google Cloud and would advise anyone to stay away. But if you are considering, do take caution and know what you are signing up for. Do what you can to find out and decide for yourself.
