Google Senior Software Engineer reviews

4.3

89% would recommend to a friend

(1,547 total reviews)
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Sundar Pichai

63% approve of CEO

78% positive business outlook

Senior Software Developer Engineer employees have rated Google with 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on 1,547 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Senior Software Developer Engineer professionals have an excellent working experience there. Google is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Senior Software Developer Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Informatique industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
4.0
May 17, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Any alien technology, sufficiently advanced, will appear to be magic. Compared to what anyone else is doing what Google has built in its worldwide serving infrastructure is magic. No-one, not even Defense, has the compute power on the scale that Google has. If you can manage to live up to the challenge you are in the very top echelon of engineering talent in the world. There is also a culture of rewarding and supporting us engineers in building and maintaining that infrastructure.

Cons

Massive pressure to perform to the level of your peers, to the level of legendary figures who have gone before, and to the levels required to keep the dollar generating machinery running. Also, Management, communication and other people skills are not favored in Engineering. The results are predictably enough that technically competent engineers who demonstrate good results, get management responsibilities that they fit in between technical work. Those that have the people skills don't get these promotions. I have not personally suffered from this so this analysis is not sour grapes. I have seen women who are already doing the project management role out of necessity as well as their own technical load, get passed over for promotion even though the projects they are on succeed, because they can't point to high personal metrics due to their unrecognized management load.

5.0
Apr 26, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

People think better of you if you work at Google. The people you work with are really really smart, because Google sets the bar for hiring so high. There's free breakfast, lunch, and dinner - and it's good. The yearly bonus tends to be even more than the percentage in the offer letter.

Cons

We're stuck in cubicles. (Before Google, I worked at Microsoft, and at MSFT everyone gets their own office, or at least, every engineer...) The stock price is variable, so if you join and the stock's at 700, and then the stock goes down to 500, you may end up resenting the people who just got hired and have an option strike price $200 lower than you.

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