They're one of the worlds biggest (my share market value, and mind share) companies, and almost the entirety of their revenue is generated by collecting huge amounts of personal information about people all over the web, and using that data to sell adverts, all over the web.
Yes, a percentage of their revenues have been spent on things that help people without inflicting more harm (e.g. some of their software contributions to the world, some services they run "for free" which the industry uses for security purposes).
That doesn't mean their other actions should be ignored or accepted as OK.
Edit:
Based on the other comment maybe this is about considering working for Google?
I wouldn't work for Google for all the money in the world. I've had a high paying contract position doing work I didn't really enjoy that much, on projects that made questionable choices (I don't mean tech choices).
The saying "you can't buy happiness" is fucking true. If you are doing something you hate, all the money in the world won't make you enjoy it.
Common sense (and my limited sample size of friends I know working at Google) tells me that the vast majority of people working at Google love their jobs.
Why is it common sense that people would "love" to work at Google?
A lot of posts/comments/etc in the last few years say "I love my job, <employer> provides free <snacks/food/hookers/whatever> and I have unlimited time off whenever I want it.
That isn't a job you love. Thats literally a job that offers ridiculous "perks" because the job itself is not enough to attract the people they want.
It consistently tops the chats of "best places to work". Combine that with the fact that there's literally a movie about how great it is to work there and I'd say that's pretty common sense.
> Common sense is a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge things, which is shared by nearly all people and can reasonably be expected of nearly all people without any need for debate.
You think that Google being a great place to work meets this definition, despite the fact that the vast majority of people have no idea what it's like to work there.?
> It consistently tops the chats of "best places to work".
Which are answered by who? I've never even seen one of those surveys and I've worked in the industry for 13 years.
SV types tend to think the world is all like SV (which seems to be a focusing of the more general American view point)
> Combine that with the fact that there's literally a movie about how great it is to work there
There's a biographical movie about the life of Steve Jobs that has actual evidence about factual events, and they fucked it up massively. Why would you assume any movie is a true representation of something, especially a fucking comedy??
"best place to work" is a relative term, while a "job you love" is not relative (not based on comparison with other available options).
With a job you love, one is happy with just subsistence level compensation. There are very few jobs like that IMO, mainly either the ones which involve a large creative and independent component (some artists, scientists, maybe entrepreneurs) or working for the greater good.
The free perks are great, but are not the core reason that make Google's work environment compelling for the many that love it (and they don't offer unlimited time off, although I know you don't mean that literally).
Google offers a very healthy working environment for many people. It's a large and diverse company. Not everyone loves it here, of course. But many do, and it's clear it's offering an environment that has real value and pull, and tries hard to respect and empower those of us down in the trenches.
> The free perks are great, but are not the core reason that make Google's work environment compelling
> they don't offer unlimited time off, although I know you don't mean that literally
My comment wasn't limited to just Google. It was aimed at the all the software companies where often young employees rave about food or other benefits (some of which are listed as literally unlimited holiday time) and are often very quiet about the actual work itself.
I had a colleague who worked on-site for a client that is a reasonably well known game company. He (and his gf, then wife) moved from Australia to LA for this project, and then I spent a few weeks onsite on a different project for the same client.
I heard about all the 'perks' employees (and to some extent long term contractors like himself) got, and it paints a rosy picture. This company even expected all staff to spend a % of their day playing the company's own game. (To the point that they arranged for us to play while on-site, and no amount of "No thanks, I'm not really into computer games" would be heard.)
Then I went and actually worked with some of their people on one of their projects. Then I asked him about something technical to do with the work or what he was doing.
It was literally as I expressed earlier - the actual work was a fucking nightmare of bad technical debt, shitty internal politics and ridiculous priorities.
Maybe this is all an American concept - the "I made an app to help us choose what to have to lunch together" thing on HN a few months ago gave me the same idea. I have never taken or left a job because of the 'perks'. I've absolutely left jobs because the work didn't interest me, or I wanted to do something else.
Honestly it's also hard to see how those sort of places will continue in the future as remote working becomes more common place.
I agree with practically all you're saying, aside from the assertion that this largely applies to Google. I think Google is much better in this regard than many tech companies. But mileage varies, of course. Cheers.
When I say common sense, I mean this: it takes a real stretch of cynicism and uncharitable thinking to believe that most people at Google dislike their job. For a couple reasons:
1. I have a strong prior belief that most people at any company enjoy their jobs (otherwise they would leave). This includes companies like Goldman Sachs - most people there are probably super-competitive types that love "winning" and status and prestige and don't care about work life balance.
2. I have heard only positive things from people I know.
3. Every time there is a thread on HN about how bad it is to work at Google, the negative reviews are always from 1) people who never worked there or only interviewed there (you really cannot draw much impression about what it's like to work at a company from the interviews), or 2) the same group of disgruntled ex-employees.
If so, shouldn't you take your ire out on the web itself rather than Google, as Google is hardly unique in using advertising to sustain itself. Many websites do.
And what is the alternative? Everyone pays for everything, thus providing bank-authenticated billing data to every company? At least with ad supported services you can use them anonymously, if you want to. Besides, Google has their Contributor product that (in some cases) lets you pay to not see adverts. So it's not like they aren't trying to find a good balance.
Is your issue that you dislike targeted ads specifically?
If so, doesn't the fact that you can opt out of ad targeting and/or edit your own profile change anything? Surely you can see that many people would prefer to see relevant ads rather than ads intended for the wrong gender, age group, regional populations etc?
It's unfortunate that you feel so strongly about something as mundane as online advertising. Google is not the military or the CIA, where the actions of the employees can result in people getting randomly drone striked. It's just a software company.
I say these things because I used to work for Google and the people there are usually very happy. It seems a shame to rule out a company that's always tried so hard to find the right moral balances in things on grounds as flimsy as "advertising sucks".
> Is your issue just that you hate all advertising?
If I'm looking at a site about fish ponds, or gardening, I would absolutely be OK with seeing adverts about where to buy a pond liner, or a contractor who builds fish ponds.
I would even be OK with that ad being somewhat location specific based on my IP address.
The above situation would have literally helped me in a real word situation in the last month. But, because of the way the vast majority of web advertising works, there was no opportunity, because I have to block ad networks because:
I am not ok with seeing ads about "rent a cheap server today" because there's an email from a hosting company in a google apps mailbox, or because I got an email from a client asking about where to host something.
That is objectively fucking creepy.
> If so, doesn't the fact that you can opt out of ad targeting and/or edit your own profile change anything?
This is like the argument that I can go to http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/ and choose to "opt out" of aggressive web tracking. The problem is, it works on a cookie basis, meaning I have to lower my privacy settings for the whole thing to even work, and then hope that some other bad actor doesn't take advantage of that, and that the NAI members even do what they say.
Creating a google profile (and being signed into it on every device i use) so I can tell them not to track me when I view sites they don't own/run is fucking ridiculous.
> It seems a shame to rule out a company that's always tried so hard to find the right moral balances in things on grounds as flimsy as "advertising sucks".
I never said advertising sucks. I said Google are a creepy mega corporation collecting every bit of information they can.
I think that accepting advertising as a normal part of life is terrible.
I cannot escape from Coca Cola's existence. I cannot, without locking myself in a cabin, ignore corporations, because they shove themselves in my face every day, even if I don't go to the grocery store.
I walk down the street and see adverts for beauty products. So I'm reminded that whole industries, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of workers, exist to try and peddle chemicals to the insecure.
I do see it as a moral issue. Without a cost-benefit analysis, 'X would not exist without advertising' is a meaningless argument - hell, you can't even show that it's true, plenty of websites exist without advertising.
This idea that everything must be 'monetized' is broken. Artists require enough money to live and to buy materials for their art. We can provide that without everyone being encouraged to buy bollocks they don't need.
Great company. Too arrogant. It may require a kick in the pants to become what it wants to become. Something more human altering than websearch. As far as one trick ponies go. It's not too bad. I wish they hadn't given up on space.
I worked for Google as a contractor for a small team a few years ago. What's most impressive looking back is that everyone I worked with was genuinely nice and smart including the cooks and janitors. I would be willing to hire literally everyone I worked with, no exceptions. Overall, Google treats its employees really well and receives good work from them. Working at Google exposes you to best practices. Overall, Google will continue to do well for the foreseeable future as they control ~90% of the online advertising market.
I know many people at the company and have visited several times. My perception: massive, massive company, with a stellar engineering-talent brand, and raw technology that is across the board superior to all competitors.
They are mostly likely the technological leader in databases, search technology, operating systems, distributed computing, cloud computing, machine learning, and self-driving cars. I say technological leader, because while they are still pretty decent at it, product design and marketing is not their strength - which explains why IMO Apple beats them in mobile (yeah, yeah, please don't argue with me on this, this is just an opinion) and Amazon beats them with cloud computing.
Great perks, high pay (especially since the stock is doing so well). Contrary to the HN popular opinion, I have never heard anything negative about work life balance at Google, although I'm sure lots of companies are better at this than Google - I think the stereotype comes from Google's earlier days and the fact that workaholic types tend to be attracted to companies like Google.
The major negatives relate to the fact that Google is massive and somewhat elitist about credentials. Because it is so huge, it is unlikely you will get to work on any of these cool technologies (or any exact team you want to work on, for that matter) when you're just starting out at Google, unless you have some sort of "in" into Google, are from a top school, did an internship at Google already, or otherwise have some sort of significant leg up over everyone else. But regardless you'll be exposed to lots of engineering best practices. A related problem is that because many of the infrastructure/tools are internal (not to mention light years ahead of the competition), a lot of skills you learn won't be transferable to the startup world, for example.
They know too much about everyone, I don't trust them, they are quick to drop software / platforms they develop. Their products are generally appear to be ugly to me. Their search result quality is good.
I have a dozen+ friends who work at Google(Engineering). Most of them are very happy with their jobs.
As with any large company,the key to happiness is getting to work with the right team on the right problem. . The other factor here is that the specific projects you want to work on might be concentrated in (say) Mountain View and you want to live in Bangalore (or wherever)in which case (unless you are a superstar) you are out of luck.
The best way to get hired (again from what my friends tell me) is to be actively sought after by a specific team for your specific expertise. Else you end up wanting to work on Search Quality and/or self driving cars, and end up fixing bugs in Gmail (nothing wrong with that if that is what you want to do.
In any case, having a Googler submit your CV to HR is much better than a blind application/recruiter driven application. The good news is that they are now so large, that most tech people know someone who works for them.
Great company, would love to work there but I lack the knowledge and motivation - my current company have worn me down too much.
Obviously they harvest + use personal information on a global scale, but for the amazing free products they put out that enhance my life (I ride my motorbike a lot and get lost, I live in Google Maps), that's a fair trade.
They do make some dumb decisions (i.e. the whole YouTube + Google+ thing) but what company doesn't.
There are pluses and minuses to working for Google. On the plus side, they pay well, your colleagues will be uncommonly capable, and you'll get a chance to work on a vast scale. It's cool.
On the minus side, the company is very, very strict, particularly around its codebase. For each language, there is an extensive set of coding guidelines (actually rules) covering even minute issues like spacing. And it's actually enforced. If you're looking for a high-trust environment, or just some elbow room to do things your way, stay the heck away.
The company is also very bureaucratic, particularly around hiring and promotion. Promotions are done by independent boards, based on extensive documentation (the "perf packet") provided by the candidate and his manager/lead. At this point, these packets are hefty enough to beat a man to death with. To submit code, you'll also need to get certified for "readability" in each language you will be working in, a process that takes months.
Finally, I'd say Google has a bit of false consciousness around what sort of culture they actually have. They want to think of themselves as a free, loose sort of place where people are empowered to look for problems and go fix them. That's why they still have 20% time, for example. In truth, what you'll be rewarded for is doing what your boss wants, to his satisfaction; everything else is at best marginal. And you know, I think the employees know that, since 20% time is taken by less than 5% of the engineering staff. A culture of
"do what your boss tells you" isn't bad of course; what it is, is ordinary.
So, some big pluses, oh yeah, but some big minuses too.
I'm sure you're right about not having quite as much elbow room at google compared to other companies - but saying that I'm not sure strictly enforcing a style guide is great example a developers freedom being quashed.
Anywhere you're working on a codebase that you want to be maintainable having a style guide that is strictly enforced seems like a no brainer. Keeping in my mind google could have any number of developers working on a codebase
I don't object to having a style guide. I object to the extent of it. Some rules of good practice make sense. But having a really extensive style guide shifts code review away from what it should be focusing on -- correctness, clarity, efficiency -- towards punctilious enforcement of minutiae.
I appreciate your perspective, but would like to add a few quibbles:
I'm a big fan of the strict coding style. It enforces a consistency that I think has real value at only a temporary cost in adjusting your coding habits, which quickly (in my experience) becomes second nature. That said, I understand opinions can differ on this.
Readability is not required to submit code. It's nice to have it, of course, but it's not a blocker to productivity.
One of my favorite things about Google is their, still legitimate in my eyes, sincere desire to defeat bureaucracy as much as humanly possible for a company that is obviously at this point so big and complex. They have multiple initiatives on this front with decent exposure and I think the success on these fronts is palpable. But obviously it isn't and can't be the same as a startup in this regard.
I find the people that like lots of strictness and rules are usually managers or high level non-coding engineers. Usually these people are trying to limit development rate to something they can have control over. Usually by complaining about whitespace.
I doubt I could ever work in a place where I cannot unilaterally deploy code whenever I want. If I can't it's usually because someone is trying to be top dog by limiting access to the codebase in some way. Usually it's someone in a management or pseudo-management role. In those cases where I can't just ignore them, I can always quit and work on my own projects to restore 'engineering primacy.'
On the personal side, these days I find myself rather skeptical about Google's aims and interests and have worked to slowly divest myself from using their services (that remain [1]), several of which I do worry that I rely on but are on one sort of life support or another. Even as someone that has paid in the past for Google Apps services, I've never really felt like a customer of Google, per that adage that we aren't Google's customers, but its products (to advertisers).
As for the culture and work environments, here's my very tiny slice of exposure, for what it may be worth:
Interviewed twice last year for decreasingly technical positions. Impression I received was that I was not the hyperfocused autism-spectrum specialist insect they were looking for technically, and I definitely understand why they might feel that way. I preface with that so that you may take what follows with the appropriate grains of salt.
Across two trips out to the Bay Area the majority of interviews were still held remotely over video conferencing, which was frustrating because I could have done Hangouts just as easily from home. This seemed to underline a sort of contradictory stance on remote work in the company to me. (I don't know how much of that was due to the nature of the specific groups I interviewed with, but certainly sounded somewhat par for the course given discussions with recruiters there.) I suppose it wasn't entirely a waste of time as I did get to see some impressions of the culture in the buildings themselves.
I did not like Mountain View, but largely because I'm spoiled by where I live now and don't like driving and suburban sprawl all that much. The parts of the Google campus I saw seemed nice and happy places to be, but still seemed to be mostly a drive from anywhere interesting before/after work and even parts of themselves.
The Google office in San Francisco proper was great and in an interesting part of downtown. It was also apparently woefully undersized, largely due to Google's contradictory unwillingness for bulk remote work from home but allowance for "work from another office" and the number of employees that wanted to live/work closer to SF downtown than commute out to Mountain View.
Most of the employees I encountered seemed like good, smart people. I wish I would have had more actual face-to-face interactions. I had one technical interviewer I thought was not very good at social interaction, and I felt that unduly soured the already stressful and ugly reality of a non-face-to-face "whiteboard technical interview" performed via Google Docs and conference screen.
I realize that a lot of that comes out seeming particularly negative and sour, and I'm probably an edge case in more than one way in my experiences. That said, hopefully my anecdotes here are helpful to someone else.
[1] I was a heavy Reader user and its shutdown did a lot to lose favor from me.
31 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 81.6 ms ] threadI wouldnt work there even if I was smart enough to do so, for moral reasons.
Yes, a percentage of their revenues have been spent on things that help people without inflicting more harm (e.g. some of their software contributions to the world, some services they run "for free" which the industry uses for security purposes).
That doesn't mean their other actions should be ignored or accepted as OK.
Edit:
Based on the other comment maybe this is about considering working for Google?
I wouldn't work for Google for all the money in the world. I've had a high paying contract position doing work I didn't really enjoy that much, on projects that made questionable choices (I don't mean tech choices).
The saying "you can't buy happiness" is fucking true. If you are doing something you hate, all the money in the world won't make you enjoy it.
Why is it common sense that people would "love" to work at Google?
A lot of posts/comments/etc in the last few years say "I love my job, <employer> provides free <snacks/food/hookers/whatever> and I have unlimited time off whenever I want it.
That isn't a job you love. Thats literally a job that offers ridiculous "perks" because the job itself is not enough to attract the people they want.
You think that Google being a great place to work meets this definition, despite the fact that the vast majority of people have no idea what it's like to work there.?
> It consistently tops the chats of "best places to work".
Which are answered by who? I've never even seen one of those surveys and I've worked in the industry for 13 years.
SV types tend to think the world is all like SV (which seems to be a focusing of the more general American view point)
> Combine that with the fact that there's literally a movie about how great it is to work there
There's a biographical movie about the life of Steve Jobs that has actual evidence about factual events, and they fucked it up massively. Why would you assume any movie is a true representation of something, especially a fucking comedy??
With a job you love, one is happy with just subsistence level compensation. There are very few jobs like that IMO, mainly either the ones which involve a large creative and independent component (some artists, scientists, maybe entrepreneurs) or working for the greater good.
The free perks are great, but are not the core reason that make Google's work environment compelling for the many that love it (and they don't offer unlimited time off, although I know you don't mean that literally).
Google offers a very healthy working environment for many people. It's a large and diverse company. Not everyone loves it here, of course. But many do, and it's clear it's offering an environment that has real value and pull, and tries hard to respect and empower those of us down in the trenches.
> they don't offer unlimited time off, although I know you don't mean that literally
My comment wasn't limited to just Google. It was aimed at the all the software companies where often young employees rave about food or other benefits (some of which are listed as literally unlimited holiday time) and are often very quiet about the actual work itself.
I had a colleague who worked on-site for a client that is a reasonably well known game company. He (and his gf, then wife) moved from Australia to LA for this project, and then I spent a few weeks onsite on a different project for the same client.
I heard about all the 'perks' employees (and to some extent long term contractors like himself) got, and it paints a rosy picture. This company even expected all staff to spend a % of their day playing the company's own game. (To the point that they arranged for us to play while on-site, and no amount of "No thanks, I'm not really into computer games" would be heard.)
Then I went and actually worked with some of their people on one of their projects. Then I asked him about something technical to do with the work or what he was doing.
It was literally as I expressed earlier - the actual work was a fucking nightmare of bad technical debt, shitty internal politics and ridiculous priorities.
Maybe this is all an American concept - the "I made an app to help us choose what to have to lunch together" thing on HN a few months ago gave me the same idea. I have never taken or left a job because of the 'perks'. I've absolutely left jobs because the work didn't interest me, or I wanted to do something else.
Honestly it's also hard to see how those sort of places will continue in the future as remote working becomes more common place.
1. I have a strong prior belief that most people at any company enjoy their jobs (otherwise they would leave). This includes companies like Goldman Sachs - most people there are probably super-competitive types that love "winning" and status and prestige and don't care about work life balance.
2. I have heard only positive things from people I know.
3. Every time there is a thread on HN about how bad it is to work at Google, the negative reviews are always from 1) people who never worked there or only interviewed there (you really cannot draw much impression about what it's like to work at a company from the interviews), or 2) the same group of disgruntled ex-employees.
If so, shouldn't you take your ire out on the web itself rather than Google, as Google is hardly unique in using advertising to sustain itself. Many websites do.
And what is the alternative? Everyone pays for everything, thus providing bank-authenticated billing data to every company? At least with ad supported services you can use them anonymously, if you want to. Besides, Google has their Contributor product that (in some cases) lets you pay to not see adverts. So it's not like they aren't trying to find a good balance.
Is your issue that you dislike targeted ads specifically?
If so, doesn't the fact that you can opt out of ad targeting and/or edit your own profile change anything? Surely you can see that many people would prefer to see relevant ads rather than ads intended for the wrong gender, age group, regional populations etc?
It's unfortunate that you feel so strongly about something as mundane as online advertising. Google is not the military or the CIA, where the actions of the employees can result in people getting randomly drone striked. It's just a software company.
I say these things because I used to work for Google and the people there are usually very happy. It seems a shame to rule out a company that's always tried so hard to find the right moral balances in things on grounds as flimsy as "advertising sucks".
If I'm looking at a site about fish ponds, or gardening, I would absolutely be OK with seeing adverts about where to buy a pond liner, or a contractor who builds fish ponds.
I would even be OK with that ad being somewhat location specific based on my IP address.
The above situation would have literally helped me in a real word situation in the last month. But, because of the way the vast majority of web advertising works, there was no opportunity, because I have to block ad networks because:
I am not ok with seeing ads about "rent a cheap server today" because there's an email from a hosting company in a google apps mailbox, or because I got an email from a client asking about where to host something.
That is objectively fucking creepy.
> If so, doesn't the fact that you can opt out of ad targeting and/or edit your own profile change anything?
This is like the argument that I can go to http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/ and choose to "opt out" of aggressive web tracking. The problem is, it works on a cookie basis, meaning I have to lower my privacy settings for the whole thing to even work, and then hope that some other bad actor doesn't take advantage of that, and that the NAI members even do what they say.
Creating a google profile (and being signed into it on every device i use) so I can tell them not to track me when I view sites they don't own/run is fucking ridiculous.
> It seems a shame to rule out a company that's always tried so hard to find the right moral balances in things on grounds as flimsy as "advertising sucks".
I never said advertising sucks. I said Google are a creepy mega corporation collecting every bit of information they can.
I think that accepting advertising as a normal part of life is terrible.
I cannot escape from Coca Cola's existence. I cannot, without locking myself in a cabin, ignore corporations, because they shove themselves in my face every day, even if I don't go to the grocery store.
I walk down the street and see adverts for beauty products. So I'm reminded that whole industries, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of workers, exist to try and peddle chemicals to the insecure.
I do see it as a moral issue. Without a cost-benefit analysis, 'X would not exist without advertising' is a meaningless argument - hell, you can't even show that it's true, plenty of websites exist without advertising.
This idea that everything must be 'monetized' is broken. Artists require enough money to live and to buy materials for their art. We can provide that without everyone being encouraged to buy bollocks they don't need.
They are mostly likely the technological leader in databases, search technology, operating systems, distributed computing, cloud computing, machine learning, and self-driving cars. I say technological leader, because while they are still pretty decent at it, product design and marketing is not their strength - which explains why IMO Apple beats them in mobile (yeah, yeah, please don't argue with me on this, this is just an opinion) and Amazon beats them with cloud computing.
Great perks, high pay (especially since the stock is doing so well). Contrary to the HN popular opinion, I have never heard anything negative about work life balance at Google, although I'm sure lots of companies are better at this than Google - I think the stereotype comes from Google's earlier days and the fact that workaholic types tend to be attracted to companies like Google.
The major negatives relate to the fact that Google is massive and somewhat elitist about credentials. Because it is so huge, it is unlikely you will get to work on any of these cool technologies (or any exact team you want to work on, for that matter) when you're just starting out at Google, unless you have some sort of "in" into Google, are from a top school, did an internship at Google already, or otherwise have some sort of significant leg up over everyone else. But regardless you'll be exposed to lots of engineering best practices. A related problem is that because many of the infrastructure/tools are internal (not to mention light years ahead of the competition), a lot of skills you learn won't be transferable to the startup world, for example.
They seem to pay and treat their employees well though.
As with any large company,the key to happiness is getting to work with the right team on the right problem. . The other factor here is that the specific projects you want to work on might be concentrated in (say) Mountain View and you want to live in Bangalore (or wherever)in which case (unless you are a superstar) you are out of luck.
The best way to get hired (again from what my friends tell me) is to be actively sought after by a specific team for your specific expertise. Else you end up wanting to work on Search Quality and/or self driving cars, and end up fixing bugs in Gmail (nothing wrong with that if that is what you want to do.
In any case, having a Googler submit your CV to HR is much better than a blind application/recruiter driven application. The good news is that they are now so large, that most tech people know someone who works for them.
Obviously they harvest + use personal information on a global scale, but for the amazing free products they put out that enhance my life (I ride my motorbike a lot and get lost, I live in Google Maps), that's a fair trade.
They do make some dumb decisions (i.e. the whole YouTube + Google+ thing) but what company doesn't.
On the minus side, the company is very, very strict, particularly around its codebase. For each language, there is an extensive set of coding guidelines (actually rules) covering even minute issues like spacing. And it's actually enforced. If you're looking for a high-trust environment, or just some elbow room to do things your way, stay the heck away.
The company is also very bureaucratic, particularly around hiring and promotion. Promotions are done by independent boards, based on extensive documentation (the "perf packet") provided by the candidate and his manager/lead. At this point, these packets are hefty enough to beat a man to death with. To submit code, you'll also need to get certified for "readability" in each language you will be working in, a process that takes months.
Finally, I'd say Google has a bit of false consciousness around what sort of culture they actually have. They want to think of themselves as a free, loose sort of place where people are empowered to look for problems and go fix them. That's why they still have 20% time, for example. In truth, what you'll be rewarded for is doing what your boss wants, to his satisfaction; everything else is at best marginal. And you know, I think the employees know that, since 20% time is taken by less than 5% of the engineering staff. A culture of "do what your boss tells you" isn't bad of course; what it is, is ordinary.
So, some big pluses, oh yeah, but some big minuses too.
Anywhere you're working on a codebase that you want to be maintainable having a style guide that is strictly enforced seems like a no brainer. Keeping in my mind google could have any number of developers working on a codebase
Here's Google's Java style guide, if you want to have a look yourself: https://google.github.io/styleguide/javaguide.html
I'm a big fan of the strict coding style. It enforces a consistency that I think has real value at only a temporary cost in adjusting your coding habits, which quickly (in my experience) becomes second nature. That said, I understand opinions can differ on this.
Readability is not required to submit code. It's nice to have it, of course, but it's not a blocker to productivity.
One of my favorite things about Google is their, still legitimate in my eyes, sincere desire to defeat bureaucracy as much as humanly possible for a company that is obviously at this point so big and complex. They have multiple initiatives on this front with decent exposure and I think the success on these fronts is palpable. But obviously it isn't and can't be the same as a startup in this regard.
I doubt I could ever work in a place where I cannot unilaterally deploy code whenever I want. If I can't it's usually because someone is trying to be top dog by limiting access to the codebase in some way. Usually it's someone in a management or pseudo-management role. In those cases where I can't just ignore them, I can always quit and work on my own projects to restore 'engineering primacy.'
As for the culture and work environments, here's my very tiny slice of exposure, for what it may be worth:
Interviewed twice last year for decreasingly technical positions. Impression I received was that I was not the hyperfocused autism-spectrum specialist insect they were looking for technically, and I definitely understand why they might feel that way. I preface with that so that you may take what follows with the appropriate grains of salt.
Across two trips out to the Bay Area the majority of interviews were still held remotely over video conferencing, which was frustrating because I could have done Hangouts just as easily from home. This seemed to underline a sort of contradictory stance on remote work in the company to me. (I don't know how much of that was due to the nature of the specific groups I interviewed with, but certainly sounded somewhat par for the course given discussions with recruiters there.) I suppose it wasn't entirely a waste of time as I did get to see some impressions of the culture in the buildings themselves.
I did not like Mountain View, but largely because I'm spoiled by where I live now and don't like driving and suburban sprawl all that much. The parts of the Google campus I saw seemed nice and happy places to be, but still seemed to be mostly a drive from anywhere interesting before/after work and even parts of themselves.
The Google office in San Francisco proper was great and in an interesting part of downtown. It was also apparently woefully undersized, largely due to Google's contradictory unwillingness for bulk remote work from home but allowance for "work from another office" and the number of employees that wanted to live/work closer to SF downtown than commute out to Mountain View.
Most of the employees I encountered seemed like good, smart people. I wish I would have had more actual face-to-face interactions. I had one technical interviewer I thought was not very good at social interaction, and I felt that unduly soured the already stressful and ugly reality of a non-face-to-face "whiteboard technical interview" performed via Google Docs and conference screen.
I realize that a lot of that comes out seeming particularly negative and sour, and I'm probably an edge case in more than one way in my experiences. That said, hopefully my anecdotes here are helpful to someone else.
[1] I was a heavy Reader user and its shutdown did a lot to lose favor from me.
As a normal person, I see Google as a company looking to collect all of my personal info.
EDIT:
To add:
They really pissed me off joining all their services under one account (YouTube really).
Their search is getting worse but it is still the best out there. I use DuckDuckGo normally but often have to go back to Google search.